The 50-bed hotel on the edge of Bishop Auckland's new Kingsway Quarter

It is on the north side of Victoria Avenue and so is just outside the redevelopment area that was outlined last week in Memories.

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It is now occupied by SpecSavers and it is plain to see that above the modern green shopfront that this was once an important building.

It was built in the mid-1870s. On August 13, 1876, mason James Brown fell to his death when a chimney he was finishing off collapsed, bringing down the scaffolding on which he was working.

But only three days later, an advertisement in the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer newspaper described the Royal George as “as one of the largest hotels in the town, containing a dining room, coffee room, sitting room, smoke room and commercial room and 50 bedrooms, with stabling for 30 horses, coach houses and a lawn behind”.

This was clearly a big hotel for a town like Bishop. Perhaps it was too big, because within a decade, its upper floor had been converted into a concert hall. In 1888, professional pianist Ada Redfers sued the landlord, Thomas Sayers, for £1 13s after he failed to pay her fully for her week’s engagement, and in 1889, a new landlord, Henry Wood, was advertising in a national performers’ magazine for “sentimental vocalists and dancers to start Monday next, November 11”.

Mr Wood was a colourful character, as he was fined 10 shillings for being drunk on his own premises and then for allowing others to be drunk in his hotel.

In September 1890, because of these, and other, misdemeanours, magistrates refused to renew his licence. Police told the court: “The billiard room has been made into a music hall, and the place has been, in fact, reduced to less than a third class public house. There are 12 public houses within 200 yards of it, and 64 pub houses in a town of 13,000 inhabitants.”

An 1892 advert for Archibald Ramsden's piano showrooms, including in Bishop Auckland

This appears to have been the end of the Royal George as a hotel, but it was quickly reborn as a piano showroom. It was taken on by Archibald Ramsden, of Leeds and Bond Street, London, who had a chain of music shops across the north, including in Darlington. He imported pianos from the continent and sold them to the middle class of a thriving place like Bishop with his innovative “three year payment scheme” – a hire purchase scheme which allowed you to play today but pay tomorrow.

With Mr Ramsden’s showroom, which had up to 400 instruments on display, on one side of Victoria Street (as it was then called) and Michael Cleminson’s three storeys of furniture on display in his new Victoria House on the other, this part of Bishop must have felt pretty grand.

READ MORE: THE HISTORY OF THE RUNDOWN BUILDINGS ABOUT TO BE TRANSFORMED INTO THE KINGSWAY QUARTER

On January 12, 1891, The Northern Echo said: “It would be difficult to meet in most towns in the north with finer buildings than those which flank the entrance to Victoria Street, with Mr Archibald Ramsden’s magnificent piano saloon on one side and Mr Michael Cleminson’s colossal cabinet and furniture emporium on the other.”

Although Mr Ramsden’s German upright pianos are now regarded as almost worthless as musical instruments, there are still hundreds of them as ornaments in people’s homes, often with Mr Ramsden’s name on the lid – do you have an Archibald Ramsden?

The Boots shop front in the Royal George with Victoria Avenue going off to the right. A poster in the window advertises "Pure Drugs", a Victorian Boots tradename. Above the window on the left are two enamel signs. The top one says "West Auckland"; the lower one says "Space for one carriage"

The piano emporium only lasted 20 years because in 1912, the £160-a-year lease on the former Royal George Hotel was taken on by Boots the chemist. It became their branch number 562 and promised “health for a shilling”.

It even sold Erasmus Will's Wind Pills for 1s ½d. Whatever complaint could they have cured?

A postcard of Newgate Street showing the Royal George building occupied by Boots on the right hand side

In 1922, the chemist took £12,615, but then the General Strike and the Great Depression hit the coalfield around Bishop especially hard, and in 1931, Boots takings had fallen to £11,523 in the year. After the late Victorian prosperity, it doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to date the decline of Newgate Street, and Bishop Auckland, to this period.

Boots staff in the Royal George building shortly before the branch moved in 1976. From left, Hazel Sowerby, Pam Carr, Lesley Copeland, Lesley Frazer and Enid Wilson

Boots, though, survived and in 1976 bought the Three Tuns pub (above) which was eight doors north of the Royal George on Newgate Street. It demolished the pub and replaced it with a bland 1970s shop which must have been cheaper to run than a fading 100-year-old former 50-bedroom hotel.

The Boots in Newgate Street in 2022 when its closure was announced, ending 110 years in Bishop Auckland

The new Boots opened on September 28, 1976, by long term employee Syd Marshall, and took £1,200 in its opening hour.

Boots remained in Newgate Street until 2022, ten years after it opened in the out-of-town St Helens retail park. Its store on the corner of Durham Chare is looking for a new trader, but at least SpecSavers still flies the flag for the Royal George.

The old hotel is on the margins of the Kingsway Quarter although, as we told last week, Mr Cleminson’s Victoria House is currently being converted into tourist accommodation upstairs with a smokehouse restaurant and craft brewery downstairs.

However, it is hoped that the revival of the buildings in the Kingsway Quarter with ripple out along the street.

The Echo finished its article in January 12, 1891, about the grandeur of the area by returning to Mr Ramsden’s musical emporium. It said: “The Royal George piano saloon is now one of the ‘lions’ of the town. The big selection of splendid instruments represents a large sum, and constitute a spectacle which never fails to attract visitors. This and other establishments distinctly enhance the business attraction of the town, in which all get a share of the traffic which flows to and fro in the busy streets.”

FOR more than 80 years, Michael Cleminson’s furniture emporium in Victoria House was occupied by Burton’s the tailors, who arrived in 1923 and departed in 2009.

“I’m told that every Burton’s in the country, including this one had a snooker hall on its upper floor,” says Barbara Laurie, the Bishop Auckland historian and former mayor.

Burton’s began expanding hugely from their Leeds base in the early 1920s, nearly always taking over high street buildings which, like Victoria House, were on a corner – the founder, Sir Montague Burton, believed this gave them greater prominence.

He usually put a billiards hall on the top floor as a way of attracting young men into his shop. Even if they didn’t buy a suit on their way through, they had to pay an annual membership which helped pay the shop’s rent.

“The building beside Burton’s on Newgate Street was Bentley’s Yorkshire Breweries, but I believe it was only a bottling plant, so whole tankers of beer came up from Yorkshire,” she says.

Bentley’s was based in Leeds and when it was taken over by Whitbread in 1968, it had at least three pubs in Bishop: The Black Boy in Newgate Street, the Crown in North Bondgate and the Three Tuns, which Boots demolished.

Going further into the Kingsway Quarter, Barbara adds: “The Temperance Hall belonged to the co-op and in its early days had a Temperance missionary living there.

“The upstairs was a theatre – the balcony is still in existence, I believe – and I was regularly taken there in my young days to see our local Gilbert and Sullivan performances.”

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