The Hotel, Church Stretton

A lot of people will tell you that A.E. Housman, author of A Shropshire Lad, never visited the county. But Church Stretton Through the Ages by Tony Crowe and Barry Rayner tells a different story::

The Hotel was the centre of the town's social life, the place for business meetings and the venue for formal dinners. The poet A.E. Housman stayed at the hotel for nearly a month in 1899 among his "blue remembered hills".

The photograph here shows just part of The Hotel, and it was only one of several large hotels that flourished in the town's late Victorian and Edwardian heyday as a resort.

Today all but one - the Longmynd Hotel, which hangs on a little grimly - have gone, demolished or converted to other uses.

There is a tragic story behind the closure of The Hotel in 1968, which I shall tell in another post.