Liverpool Hotel

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Two storey/ three bay former hotel on N side of Mary Street.

Pitched natural slate roof with terracotta ridge tiles and a rendered chimney with moulded coping to each gable. Cast iron rooflights to rear slope. Advanced eaves course supports ogee metal gutters (downpipe on right gable).

Front elevation faces SW to street. The ground floor has band rustication. The first floor is lined rendered and painted with V-channelled quoins. Chamfered basecourse, moulded cill courses, and cornice between ground and first floors. At either end of ground floor, plain broad pilasters support the moulded cornice and continue up as panelled blocks to the first floor cill course. All openings have been infilled with concrete blocks.

Main entrance is to centre and is partially infilled to accommodate a smaller steel security door. The opening is semicircular headed with decorative keystone, channelled pseudo voussoirs and coved arrises. It is flanked by slender pilasters with plain capitals and fluted friezes which terminate at the cornice. There is a single window to each ground floor bay, both with fluted pilaster architraving, flat moulded head and raised keystone. There are three equally space windows to first floor, detailed as those below but narrower.

Left gable is rendered and unpainted. There are various modern additions and extensions filling the space between main rear extension and boundary. There is window set to left of first floor.

Rear elevation ground floor is obscured by a large, pitched corrugated asbestos roofed modern extension, which reaches almost to the rear boundary of the site; its ridge level is at the eaves of main building. To its left is a further flat roofed section, not as long, also modern, with a small, canted addition in the internal corner between it the main extension. Various windows and doors, all modern. First floor of original hotel obscured by the larger extension and the windows appear to have been removed.

Right gable is rendered and unpainted. Ground floor abutted by flat roofed modern extension. First floor blank.

Historical information

Shown on the 1834 Valuation town plan as a rectangular building aligned at right angles to the street. Then measured 34ft x 23ft x 16ft. These statistics equate with those given on the 1863 Valuation (11.5yds x 7.5yds x 2.5 storeys), in which it is noted as "a large private house". It became a public house around 1898 and a hotel about 1911. Its valuation increases from £18 to £30 at the time of this last change of use, the magnitude of this increase implying a substantial refurbishment of the original structure if not a complete rebuild.

Primary sources.

1. Valuation town map, 1834 (PRONI, VAL/1D/3/2).
2. First Valuation book, 1835 (PRONI, VAL/1B/367, p.106).
3. Second Valuation book, 1863 (PRONI, VAL/2B/3/65B, p.16).
4. Valuation Revision books (PRONI, VAL/12B/22/23E, p.142; /23F, p.128).

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

This building has an attractive stuccoed façade but little, if anything, remains of the original house. The hotel of 1911 has been substantially altered.