The Lion Hotel.

There are records of the Lion Hotel dating back to 1618 although its history stretches back further than that as it was built on one of the busiest roads leading in and out of Shrewsbury. The hotel is now housed in three buildings. The timber-framed section in the middle is the oldest with parts dating back to the 15th century. The top section was altered after the arrival of Robert Lawrence and most of the work including the beautiful Adam style ballroom and assembly room are attributed to local architect Thomas Farnolls Pritchard. The carved lions that stand over the front door and the assembly room at the rear are the work of another Shrewsbury man, John Nelson and are thought to date from 1777. The lower section of the hotel has been a private house and an Inland Revenue office, before being absorbed into the Lion.

With the arrival of Mr. Lawrence and the creation of the Assembly Room Shrewsbury and the Lion Hotel became the centre of social life for the nobility and local gentry who would attend dinners, concerts and glittering balls in the splendid surroundings of the hotel. The hotel's popularity continued throughout the 19th century with great artists and personalities as Paganini the violinist, Jenny Lind the Swedish Nightingale and Charles Dickens the novelist all-playing to a huge audience. Dickens who also stayed in the hotel wrote that he was lodged in "the strangest little rooms, the ceilings of which I can touch with my hand." He also commented that he could walk out onto a balcony and "lean over a queer old rail and look all down hill and slantwise at the strangest black and white houses, all of many shapes except straight shapes."

The Lion's repute continued into the 20th century with many events being staged there including the fashionable dinner and dances that were so popular in the 1950s and 60s and the Saturday night dances organised by Bert Dann, where you could dance the night away to the music of Don Gilbert and his band.

As well as redeveloping the hotel into a fashionable social centre Lawrence also established the Lion as one of the principal coaching hotels in the country and was instrumental in changing people's minds on the route of the London to Holyhead road bringing it through Shrewsbury instead of Chester. Lawrence died in 1806 before reaping the full benefits of his work but within thirty years of his death twenty-three coaches travelled into town with over half of them using the Lion. One of the great spectacles of the town in the 1820s was the return of the Wonder Coach, driven by Samuel Haywood that travelled from London to Shrewsbury in sixteen hours. Haywood was never more than fifteen minutes late and crowds would gather at the top of the Cop, which was much narrower in those days to watch him gallop at full speed up the hill. As he reached the summit and without slacking speed he would do a sharp left hand turn into the Lion yard. The entrance gave him about six inches of clearance on either side with very little head room, but he accomplished this for over fifteen years without the slightest accident.

By 1900, with the coming of the railway the coaching trade became a thing of the past. The owner at this time was John Southern who ran a free house with sixteen bedrooms for the accommodation of nineteen guests. There were also five public rooms and stabling for thirty horses at the rear.

Many notable people have been accommodated at the Hotel including Thomas De Quincey who was lodged in the ballroom as all the other rooms were taken and Benjamin Disraeli who was the town's M.P. from 1841 to 1843. In 1855 after a short stay the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that the hotel was "very dark in the lower apartments, pervaded with a musty odor, but provided with a white-neck-clothed waiter, who spares no ceremony in serving the joints of mutton."