‘’A taste of the Country in the heart of the City’’

Today, The Jacobean Hotel stands as a well-loved Independent Hotel, Restaurant and Bar on the Holyhead Road, which has been sympathetically restored and refurbished, to combine original character with modern facilities. It all begins in 1816, where the hotel was built on the site of an old farm building; at a closer look, you can see that a few of the features remain the same! Aside from the Hotel, we have our Restaurant and Bar area, which hosts small to large table seatings for any occasion, such as birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, baby showers, christenings, graduation, wakes, or simply ‘just because.’ We offer both traditional and contemporary dishes, using only the finest local produce. Our Events are catered by ourselves where we welcome conversation about bespoke menu ideas and are highly flexible due to everything being made in house and catered to you. We cannot do enough for our customers and will always pride ourselves on going the extra mile regarding requests and preference. The Jacobean backs onto the Coundon Wedge; an attractive stretch of countryside on the north-west outskirts of Coventry. It retains a rural character of very high landscape quality and is a popular public area for scenic walks where dogs are welcomed on and off lead due to there being fields where horses are left to graze.

History of the Jacobean Hotel

The photographs attached to this article displays immense progression of the building from 1816 to the present day. Notably, the first ‘photograph’ of the building was a glass plate negative, which we believe dates to the 1880s. The clearer image beside it is a print from the glass negative before the damage – which was sourced from a Coventry Evening Telegraph article from May 1990. The white markings near the bottom of the glass plate negative represent the damage to the delicate glass negative. However two ladies, two small children and a dog can be clearly seen.

In 1871, William King was the tenant farmer, aged 30 and farming 240 acres, employing three men and a boy, but living only with a housekeeper and general servant. On 25th September 1872, he married Mary Ann Docker, the eldest daughter of Samuel Docker of Clay Lane Farm, Allesley. By 1877, the farm had been taken over by the 22-year-old Thomas Rawson Vickers, who was still there at the time of the 1881 census, aged 26, farming 264 acres, living only with a cook (aged 26) and housemaid (aged 24). A visitor, Ralph Stanley Sadler (31) was staying with him at the time the census was taken. However, on 27th July 1881, he married Amy Jane Kerr of Moffat. In late June 1884, Kelly's Directory described the building for the first time as 'Brooklands', which must have been when the name was first introduced. Two sons were born at Brooklands, Vincent Rawson Scott on 25th May 1882 and Douglas Kerr Scott in October 1884. In this detail from the old photograph, showing two children with two women and a dog, therefore, the woman and boy sitting on the house steps might possibly be Amy and Vincent.

There is another image from the same collection that shows a smart lady on a horse beside the entrance to the Brooklands farmhouse whose identity unfortunately unknown.

By February 1888, Vickers was giving up his farm in Allesley village and moving to Hollyberry Hall, off Clay Lane in the wider Allesley rural parish. The new incoming tenant was John Lloyd, who was certainly at Brooklands by early September 1888. He stayed for some 45 years until he died on 30th December 1932, aged 91. John had been born at Arley Hall in October 1842; he married Ann Taylor in October 1870, but she died in July 1874. He married again in September 1883, his new wife being Mary Ellen Pearman of Radford Semele. John Lloyd was the tenant farmer at the time the Greswolde estate was sold off in 1919. The new owners seem to have been the Trustees of Sir Thomas White's Charity. John's daughter May revisited the farm many years later, in August 1969, by which time it had become the Brooklands Farm Hotel, under proprietor Frederick Tyler. Aged 71 at the time, May wrote in the guest book that she was born there on 13th February 1897. Many years later, May again visited the house, now the Brooklands Grange Hotel, in May 1990 at the age of 93! This time she was accompanied by Charlie Gardner, aged 85, who had begun working for her father John from the age of 12! May recalled skating on the pond behind the house and how there were two bridges that crossed the brook that ran through the garden (and marked the Allesley/Coundon boundary).

The Lloyd family left Brooklands not long after John's death, and the new tenant by 1934 was Eric Norman Lewis, who stayed until at least 1938 and possibly 1939. Tom Snowden Beaty transferred to Brooklands from Lyng Hall Farm in Wyken in 1939, because the Lyng Hall farmland was required for house building purposes. He also took on Church Farm around the same time, and it seems he may have been based at the latter, because also in 1939 the farmhouse at Brooklands was being advertised as a high-class residential guest house for long-term guests. Names associated with the guest house during the war years included a Mr Bowness, D. A. Pearce, H. W. Kenney and A. W. Blyth. Blyth was there by 1941 and stayed until September 1956; he may have been the proprietor. The house was still called a guest house in 1959, but by 1963 was called a hotel. The advertisement shown above dates from July 1967.

In the 1980s Frederick Tyler was proud to be able to say that his hotel was one of the few in the country to still offer accommodation for guests and their horses - perhaps particularly unexpected in Coventry, the motor car city!

Coventry City Council purchased the Brooklands Farm buildings and land in 1945, just under 48 acres, from the Trustees of Sir Thomas White's Charity. Tom Beaty was still farming the associated land in early 1950, when he appeared in a Telegraph article celebrating 'veterans of the land' in the Coventry district. Mr Beaty was then aged 78, farming 90 acres in total and by that time concentrating mainly on cattle grazing. He was assisted on the farms by Joseph Ludgrove, aged 80. Both had previously worked long periods at Lyng Hall Farm, which Tom Beaty took on in 1906, joined by Mr Ludgrove in 1915.

The Brooklands Farm guest house and hotel of the 1950s had many famous guests from the entertainment world, including the Beatles, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and Cilla Black!

The renaming to 'Brooklands Grange Hotel' reflected a change of management at the Brooklands Farm Hotel in 1990, where the house was altered, modernised, and extended. Unfortunately, Brooklands Grange Hotel went into administration in August 2011.

The new owners reopened the premises from Christmas season 2011 and renamed the hotel again to The Jacobean Hotel. The hotel enjoys a good reputation as a privately owned 'boutique' hotel with friendly, helpful staff and returning custom.

Although no longer associated with the hotel itself, the old stables remain on the west side of the old farmhouse, accessed from a separate driveway from the Holyhead Road. The large outdoor area at the back of the Hotel has a lovely view of the stables and fields of horses, which can also be seen from a few of the Hotel rooms! In the warmer months this area is utilised as a beer garden, where we serve bar snacks and the occasional BBQ.

''The hotel is forever adapting, growing and refurbing, with huge plans for the next coming years.''

Credit to Mr Mark Singlehurst via Facebook 2021 for his informative Facebook post on the History of the Jacobean - 13^th May 2021.