Hotel review: the oldest continually operated hotel in the UK

Before the Red Lion Hotel in Salisbury was renamed in the early 1700s it  was known as the White Bear Inn which opened as a guest house for the architects and other professionals who built the Salisbury cathedral around 1220.

That makes the Red Lion the oldest continually operated hotel in the UK and possibly the world, although probably Damascus has something from Roman times or earlier.

Historical hotel

If you like your hotel history then this is a great place to stay though its only been in the present family ownership for 80 years and a lot of the almost 800 years of hotel life is lost in time.

There is a two hundred year old clock with an even older case thought to have been carved by Spanish prisoners from the failed Armada invasion of 1588. The clock was installed because a tax on time pieces in the Napoleonic wars meant that many inn keepers bought clocks so that their watch-less customers knew the time!

Even the hanging creeper plant in the courtyard – yes the original one where coaches and horses used to arrive and depart for London – is over 200 years old. The Red Lion was for many years a mail coach station until the railway arrived in the nineteenth century.

But does it make for a nice place to stay? There have been so many additions to the hotel over the years that you lose count. But the room ArabianMoney is inhabiting this week is comfortably mock-medieval with heavy curtains and bedspread and a warm red carpet and wallpaper.

The free WiFi works and the room has small flat TV and tea and coffee making facilities. We liked the Tudor-style and possibly Tudor-original Vine restaurant as well as the large 1220 bar and generous lobby lounge. Try the excellent pipping hot full English breakfast for a treat.

Nifty service

We also could not complain at the speed of response when we could not get a fan in the bathroom to stop, and the bathroom itself is small but does have a separate shower.

Altogether a room with a pleasantly old ambience although it is actually in one of the newer sections. Also quite a bargain at less than $100 on the Internet this week.

Times are pretty tough for UK hotels but the Red Lion has survived 791 years through the Black Death and failed invasion attempts. It will make it through the next recession.