Platinum Jubilee listings
Sherds was intrigued to see that the Imperial Hotel in Stroud, Gloucestershire, is one of six buildings newly listed in celebration of Her Majesty the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. The somewhat slender reason for connecting this building with the Jubilee is that the then-Princess Elizabeth ‘visited the hotel as part of a tour of Stroud’ in 1950. There must be any number of places that the Queen has visited over the last 70 years. Indeed, in December 1981 she stopped off not far from Stroud at the Cross Hands Hotel, Old Sodbury, Gloucestershire, after her journey from Badminton to Windsor was delayed by a blizzard. The Queen’s chauffeur asked if Her Majesty could use the loo, though the hotel’s website puts it more diplomatically: she ‘took advantage of our renowned hospitality’. The hotel now boasts a Queen Elizabeth Suite, even though she only stayed for a cup of tea before proceeding to Windsor – a case of ‘the Queen very nearly slept here’ to match the many hotels that claim Elizabeth I as an overnight visitor.
Bohemian Stroud
One wonders how the good people of Stroud took the news of the Jubilee listing. The town sits at the western edge of the Cotswolds, a part of England that is solidly royalist and has two royal homes, at Gatcombe and at Highgrove. It is firmly conservative (with a small and a capital ‘C’) and has numerous aristocratic estates of many thousands of hectares that the landscape historian H P R Finberg believed were the direct descendants of Roman villa estates (though this attractive idea is not widely accepted by other academics).
Stroud is proud to stand apart from all of this. Located at the meeting point of five valleys with fast-flowing rivers, it has a fine legacy of 18th- and 19th-century cloth and fulling mills that once claimed to have supplied the uniforms for soldiers on both sides of the Napoleonic Wars. They were later famous for tennis balls and billiard-table baize. Damien Hirst now has his factory in one of those mills, as does the Pangolin Editions sculpture foundry, which casts and fabricates bronze sculptures for many of the foremost artists of our time.
