The Furness Abbey Hotel was demolished in 1953, having been bombed in May 1941. Its site now forms the car park to Furness Abbey and the museum. The station at Furness Abbey also suffered bomb damage and was demolished in the early 1950s. The original station booking office and refreshment room, built in 1862, which had been attached to the hotel, survives as The Abbey Tavern, standing in Abbey Approach,

Barrow-in-Furness Barrow-in-Furness is a port town and civil parish (as just "Barrow") in the Westmorland and Furness district of Cumbria, England. Historic counties of England, Historically in the county of Lancashire, it was incorporated as a municipal borou ...

Cumbria Cumbria ( ) is a ceremonial county in North West England. It borders the Scottish council areas of Dumfries and Galloway and Scottish Borders to the north, Northumberland and County Durham to the east, North Yorkshire to the south-east, Lancash ...

, England, to the north of the remains of

Furness Abbey Furness Abbey, or St. Mary of Furness, is a former monastery located to the north of Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, England. The abbey dates back to 1123 and was once the second-wealthiest and most powerful Cistercian monastery in the country, behi ...

. The current structure is recorded in the

National Heritage List for England The National Heritage List for England (NHLE) is England's official database of protected heritage assets. It includes details of all English listed buildings, scheduled monuments, register of historic parks and gardens, protected shipwrecks, ...

as a designated Grade II

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building is a structure of particular architectural or historic interest deserving of special protection. Such buildings are placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Hi ...

History

In the 17th century the whole site included the

manor house A manor house was historically the main residence of the lord of the manor. The house formed the administrative centre of a manor in the European feudal system; within its great hall were usually held the lord's manorial courts, communal mea ...

for the Preston family, and probably incorporated the guest house of Furness Abbey. By the 19th century, having gone through several ownerships after the Preston family had departed, the manor house was empty and semi-derelict until it was purchased by the

Furness Railway The Furness Railway (FR) was a railway company operating in the Furness area of Lancashire in North West England. History Formation In the early 1840s, the owners of iron ore mines in the Furness district of Lancashire became interested in a ...

in 1847. The

Lancaster Lancaster may refer to: Lands and titles *The County Palatine of Lancaster, a synonym for Lancashire *Duchy of Lancaster, one of only two British royal duchies *Duke of Lancaster *Earl of Lancaster *House of Lancaster, a British royal dynasty ...

architects

Sharpe and Paley Sharpe, Paley and Austin are the surnames of architects who practised in Lancaster, Lancashire, England, between 1835 and 1946, working either alone or in partnership. The full names of the principals in their practice, which went under variou ...

converted the ruined manor house into a hotel to accommodate visitors to the Abbey. This contained 36 bedrooms and "only three bathrooms". The public rooms included an entrance hall and a reading/sitting room -both with stained glass windows, a billiard room and a ballroom. The hotel was extended as part of an integrated plan in the 1860s by E. G. Paley, to link it to the newly built Furness Abbey railway station. In 1953–54 the main hotel building was demolished, leaving the northern wing of Paley's overall design, subsequently to become the Tavern.

Architecture and assessment

The existing building, in two and three storeys, is constructed in red

sandstone Sandstone is a Clastic rock#Sedimentary clastic rocks, clastic sedimentary rock composed mainly of grain size, sand-sized (0.0625 to 2 mm) silicate mineral, silicate grains, Cementation (geology), cemented together by another mineral. Sand ...

with

slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous, metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade, regional metamorphism. It is the finest-grained foliated metamorphic ro ...

roofs. Listing information and several architectural references conflate the origins of the Abbey Tavern and the wider site -viz: it "represents a fragment of a substantial hotel (sic) that served the Furness Railway"; Matthew Hyde and

Nikolaus Pevsner Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner (30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, ''The Buildings of England'' (195 ...

comment that "it is a pity no more is left of so tantalising a building". The Booking Office/ Refreshment Room -later to become the Abbey Tavern- was physically linked to the Furness Abbey Hotel, but had a separate and distinctive railway function. With the hotel which had been built a little earlier, the building utilised stone detail salvaged from the Preston manor house, which likewise had been largely built from re-used stone taken from Furness Abbey after its dissolution. The incorporation of original medieval fragments within a mid-Victorian interpretation of medievalism has sometimes led to the mistaken inference that the Abbey Tavern building itself had been part of the hotel or even 'part of the original manor house'.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Furness Abbey Hotel, Barrow in Furness Buildings and structures in Barrow-in-Furness E. G. Paley buildings Grade II listed buildings in Cumbria Grade II listed pubs in Cumbria Railway hotels in England Sharpe and Paley buildings