The biggest fire for years in Darlington broke out at 12.40 a.m. on the top floor of the King’s Head Hotel in Prebend Row. Sixty firefighters, ten fire engines and a police helicopter took six hours to get it under control, although the 100-plus guests – from China, India, Italy and Canada – were ushered out unharmed. A quarter of the building was destroyed and it stood covered by a large tarpaulin for several years while investigations were carried out. Arson was suspected, but no culprit was ever traced.
The hotel fully reopened in 2012, so splendidly restored that a casual observer would never know how badly G.G. Hoskins’ Gothic masterpiece had been ravaged.
The King’s Head was first mentioned in 1661. It became the town’s premier coaching inn – in 1762, landlady Isabella Stephenson advertised that she had ‘good post chaises, able horses and careful drivers’, and she assured ‘noblemen, gentlemen and others of meeting with the civilest entertainments’. The railways ended the coaching era, and the last Newcastle to London stagecoach left the King’s Head in October 1852.
In 1890, Sunderland brewers R. Fenwick and Company bought the seventeenth-century hotel for £7,000 and demolished it, allowing architect Hoskins to create what The Northern Echo described on opening day – 1 June 1893 – as ‘a palatial hotel’ and a ‘temple of luxury’.
(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2003, 2008–2012)