We are well accustomed to an old building being described as a “best kept secret” or a “forgotten treasure” – it’s all part of good tourist PR.
All the same, it’s remarkable how, on our overcrowded and much scrutinised island, a building can go missing. Even if, as in this case, it is 60ft long and 22ft wide.
Such is surprisingly the case with the Lion Hotel in Leominster. Not so much the old hotel itself, since it stands in the middle of Broad Street and can hardly put on dark glasses on that account, but the Lion Ballroom behind it. Pevsner overlooked the room, and the Department of Environment removed it – despite an earlier listing at Grade II* – from its schedule of listed buildings.
Perhaps there are so many lion hotels – in a wide variety of colours – in this part of England that you can easily mislay one without noticing.
The Leominster Lion stands on the west side of Broad Street, the road that runs north-south through the middle of the town. The eponymous beast peering down from its parapet, looks more docile than its rampant counterpart at Shrewsbury, reflecting perhaps the more sedate pace of life for Herefordshire big cats.
This was not always the case. The road concerned – variously called High Street and Broad Street – was once the busiest of thoroughfares. Head this way for Hereford and Bristol to the south, and for Shrewsbury and Liverpool to the north. And an east-west route, from London to the Welsh border at Kington, passed this way too.
As a result, a host of hostelries clustered along the length of the street, all offering food and accommodation to the weary traveller and hungry trader passing through the town. There were at least nine inns along here at one time, from the Waterloo Hotel at the top end to the Unicorn at the bottom. Only one of them survives as a hotel today.
There was a Red Lion on this site from at least the mid-18th Century, doubtless popular with the stall-holders and farmers frequenting the market outside. In the local press each successive lease-holder “begged the indulgence of his friends and the public”, and promised “excellent wines and liquors and unremitting assiduity and attention”.
But the Georgian coaching trade was about to transform Leominster into a major service station, and by the 1830s nine stage and mail coaches were calling at the Red Lion each day. The Red Lion did not have the monopoly, but it was by some distance the major coaching destination in the town.
Sales particulars from the 1830s show that the inn had a granary and stables for the horses, capacious cellars, a walled garden, a cider mill, and “numerous” bedrooms. Evidently the estate agent couldn’t be bothered to count them.
However, the reputation of a good coaching inn was not founded entirely on such passing trade. Its local good-standing was based on the presence of an assembly room, a place for cards and dancing and polite Georgian chit-chat. By the early 1800s the Red Lion had cornered this market as well.
It was when an ambitious Leominster lawyer by the name of James Thomas Woodhouse took over the lease of the Red Lion in 1839 that the hotel’s assembly room was turned from necessary amenity to star attraction.
Woodhouse purchased the property next door in order to expand the hotel’s frontage and add a carriage-way, and built a grand new assembly room at the rear. A local architect, John Collins, designed the room in fashionable neo-classical style, all Corinthian columns and candelabra. Leominster had seen nothing like it.
The new assembly room was ready for its first revellers by Christmas 1843, and a succession of balls, concerts and meetings made good use of it. But the
truth was that the ex-Red Lion and new Lion Hotel and its assembly room had come just a little too late. The assembly was a declining fashion, the railway was approaching and the coaching trade was about to be killed stone-dead. Even the styling in the ballroom, you could argue, was now out of fashion. What you have on your hands, sir, is a dead lion.
Ironically, one of the last grand balls ever held at the Lion (in December 1853) was to celebrate the opening of the Ludlow to Hereford railway line. For the hotel too it was shortly to be the end of the line.
After some years of disuse, in 1861 the building was taken over by a Quaker ironmonger – Samuel Alexander – and became the Lion Implement Warehouse. The former assembly room served as his rather grand showroom, and it continued in that guise for the next century or so. By the 1960s many had forgotten just what the place was, and that included Nikolaus Pevsner. The plasterwork was falling off, and the grand entrance doors had made their exit elsewhere.
However, there’s to be no unhappy ending to this story, and we can celebrate an early Victorian masterpiece brought back from the brink.
With money from the district and town councils, and from the National Lottery, the Lion and its assembly room has been restored to its pristine best. It reopened in 1997. The age of assemblies may have departed, but there’s still a call for concerts and weddings and…er… karate classes.
Not quite what John Collins and James Woodhouse had in mind, perhaps, but there you are.
