Tag: Priory Hotel

February 28th – I mentioned last week (at least, I think it was last week…) that Walsall has some really interesting architecture above street level. Making it back to Walsall in the daylight, I took a quick scoot around. Chineys, on Park Street – when did they last see smoke? The mosaics, still on the front of the former Priory Hotel. Crests, cupolas and cornices. The Edwars Moore building is beautiful from the front, in Leicester Street (look at the upstairs windows), but equally so from the rear. There’s fantastic detail in those chimneys. Yet the building is scarcely noticed.

Walsall still has some gems.

February 15th – One of the last vestiges of ‘old’ Park Street in Walsall isn’t actually to be found in Park Street at all – it’s in St. Pauls Street, just behind the old Bus Station Offices, themselves sited in what was built as the Victorian Blue Coat School. On a loading bay door, normally propped open with stillages, there’s a sign indicating that this is the correct entry to the bar of The Priory Hotel, which, as far as I recall, closed in the 1980’s. The access way now forms the loading bay to MacDonalds, but it is the clothes shop next to it that was the pub. Probably better closed, in my day it had a fearsome reputation. Now all that remain are this sign, classically 70’s Ansell’s brewery style, and the two odd mosaic artworks on the front.