Railway Hotels

A wonderfully evocative guide to the history and the architecture of Britain's railway station hotels.

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This book celebrates the British railway station hotel. It focuses on those hotels built or acquired by the railway companies themselves rather than on the many railway or station hotels built by local entrepreneurs as speculative ventures up and down the country. It traces the success and failure of some of the early railway hotels but at its heart are those, such as Glasgow’s Central Hotel, the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras or the Royal Victoria Hotel in Sheffield, which survived the first century of Britain’s railways to become part of the Hotels Executive on the nationalisation of the railways in 1948 and, later, the British Transport Hotels group. Many of those built by the railway companies during the Victorian era have survived and continue to prosper into the twenty-first century.

In this book, Michael Patterson uses a wonderful collection of photographs to share with the reader the grand architecture of many of the station hotels, the beauty of their decoration and the vaulting ambition behind their construction.