Noteworthy Buildings on The Commons – The Wellington Hotel

The Spring issue of Common Ground featured the Spa Hotel, and previous issues have included articles about the Royal Wells and the former Earls Court Hotels on the Mount Ephraim ridge. This time it is the turn of the Travelodge, or the Wellington Hotel as this prominent building was known for most of its life.

Built in around 1873, partly on the site of a pair of houses called Gilead Place, and partly in the grounds of Chancellor House, the property originally formed a mansion block of eight terraced houses. A surviving plan of that date, for new stabling to be built at Gilead Place to the designs of the local architect William Bamsley Hughes, shows the building as “new houses”. Hughes’ client was Francis Peek (1834-99), one of the richest tea merchants of his day, and first cousin of Sir Henry Peek, Chairman of Peek Freans biscuits.

The Wellington was opened on Monday 21 st November 1875, under the management of John Braby, Hughes having converted five of the eight houses to form a hotel.
Formerly the proprietor of the old Kentish Hotel near the Pantiles, Braby was described in the Courier as having “all the essential qualifications, urbanity, courtesy, intelligent comprehension, and mature discrimination, that the head of a hotel imperatively demands.”

The venture seems to have proved a great success for, in 1898, the remaining houses of the mansion block were added, as part of a major re-modelling. This was undertaken jointly by Hughes and the nationally known architect Sir Robert Edis, who was also working at that time on the spectacular Great Central Hotel (now the Landmark) at London’s Marylebone Station. The central porch and the grand staircase were features of this 1898 re-modelling of The Wellington.

Coloured glass in the grand staircase window incorporates the Wellington armorial bearings; the Wellesley Cross and Plates quartered with the Cowley Lion Rampant.
An advertisement in Pelton’s Directory tells us that the establishment was indeed patronised by the Duke of Wellington, but not of course the first Duke, who had died in 1852. There is no evidence that the “Iron Duke” ever visited Tunbridge Wells, although his Duchess came several times and stayed nearby on Mount Ephraim.

The hotel underwent further refurbishments, notably in 1909 and following the acquisition of the property by Trust Houses in 1927. Nevertheless, the Italianate grandeur of the frontage to the Common, with its canopied first floor balconies in the Regency tradition, has remained little changed over the years. Today, this listed building forms part of the budget hotel chain Travelodge, which has upwards of 360 hotels across the UK, Ireland and Spain.

Philip Whitbourn