For my final post in this short series about seaside buildings, here’s a very different structure on the Quay in Dartmouth. The hotel has been a vital feature of coastal towns since seaside holidays became popular in the 19th century, but many coastal hotels have a longer history, as stopping places for travellers and visitors alike. This one, far older than the 19th century, has the pale coloured walls of my previous coastal buildings, but there the resemblance ends.
The Royal Castle Hotel began life in 1639 as a pair of merchants’ houses. They had timber-framed fronts, although some of the cross walls are stone. By 1736 one of the houses was an inn, called the New Inn, and later during the 18th century the two houses were combined to form a single property, by now called the Castle. There was a major remodelling in 1840, with internal upgrades and a renewal of the front that faces the water. This was probably when the timber frame was plastered over – it’s still there underneath, as shown by the fact that the first and second floors both protrude slightly from the storey above, a fashion that was popular in 1639 but had died out by the following century. The elaborate faux fortification – crenellations and turrets – that make up the parapet may well date from the time of the remodelling and there may or may not have been something similar there when the inn was renamed the Castle.
At a quick glance, the Royal Castle Hotel looks very much of a piece – white facade, sash windows, battlements, gilded lettering. But it’s actually the creation of several separate phases of building and upgrading, over nearly 400 years. Like so many old buildings that look as if they’ve been the same for centuries, this one has been – in architectural terms at least – continuously changing to meet seaside and wider needs and fashions, metaphorically on the move.
I don't know if this shot illustrates my "frontage" theory, as observed at Battle in Sussex and at Tewkesbury. The buildings are all to different designs and heights, but by and large they occupy plots of approximately the same size. The building with the bays to the immediate left of the "Castle" might represent a passage between the plots later filled in? Although there is no attempt at uniformity, "town planning", at some stage the ground was carefully marked out and allotted to different occupiers: in other words, somebody decided that this was to be "town" and began to create one from scratch. Elements of each plot, such as the foundations, might be older than 400 years? Compare a building at or next to The Shambles, York, with a bit of Romanesque work absorbed into the later building, or The Lamb, Old Town, Eastbourne, claiming bits from the 12th century.
ReplyDelete"Like so many old buildings that look as if they’ve been the same for centuries, this one has been – in architectural terms at least – continuously changing to meet seaside and wider needs and fashion". This is an interesting sentence. I always thing of holiday resorts nostalgically i.e where my brothers and I went in the 1950s and where mum and her sisters went in the 1930s. Even if reality has changed, you don't want seaside memories to change :)
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