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Limpley Stoke Hotel and Cliffe Hotel
Lower Limpley Stoke, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire
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Built on the site of and perhaps incorporating Stoke Farm, a former gabled farmhouse dated 1625, the present building was designed by architect William Jervis Stent (who also designed the Congregational Church in Holt). It was opened on the 29th August 1863, not as a hotel, but as the West of England Hydropathic Establishment, offering water therapies under a resident physician that were presumably inspired by those of the nearby spa at Bath and its Mineral Hospital. It was originally owned by Charles Jupe & Son of Mere and was managed by Thomas Preston, who had come from a similar hydro at Matlock in Derbyshire. Alterations and additions were designed by Bristol architect George Lawrence in 1915.
It was advertised for sale as the Limpley Stoke Hydro-Hotel in the 1930s and by 1936, with the decline in popularity of hydropathic therapy, was simply the Limpley Stoke Hotel. During the Second World War it was taken over by the Abbey National Building Society which had evacuated from London. After the war the hotel re-opened, but declined, so that a plan was put forward in 1963 to demolish it and replace it with 40 bungalows, but this was rejected. In the 1970s it was called the Gaylord Hotel, but reverted to Limpley Stoke Hotel later, coming into the ownership of Latona Leisure Group (founded in 1993) which also owns the Leigh Park Hotel at Bradford Leigh and two other hotels in Weston-super-Mare. At one time Latona also held the lease of the Hop Pole Inn.
Today the hotel trades under the brand of Best Western Hotels who advertise it as “a magnificent 18th Century country house” and “founded in the reign of James I” !
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The Cliffe Hotel
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An advertisement for the Cliffe Hotel in The Bradford on Avon & Melksham Rural District Council guidebook 1965
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Located in a house that was probably built by Spackman & Cottrell of Bath in the 1860s, the Cliffe Hotel opened in about 1961 with eleven rooms and set in 3.5 acres of grounds. From 2002 it traded, like the Limpley Stoke Hotel, under the branding of Best Western Hotels, but was privately owned and operated. Advertised for sale as a business when the owners wished to retire in 2010 and, finding no takers, it was converted back to a private house in December 2011.
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Stoke Farm, where the hotel now stands, was the house with the three gables in the distance at the centre of this lithograph by Bradford on Avon artist Elizabeth Tackle. Some of the fabric of the house may have been incorporated in the modern building.
An advertising card, probably from about 1900 (with a doodle) -the Turkish Baths had been renewed in 1899. The eighteen acres of grounds is reduced to three now.
An advertisement from the early 1950s
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A brochure from the Cliffe Hotel. The donors kept it after staying there on their honeymoon in 1974. At that time en-suite double rooms with breakfast were £5.65 or £5.75 per person + VAT at 10%. Note that Limpley Stoke was not and still is not in Somerset.