IT’S long been a beef in some quarters that Worcester doesn’t have a really posh hotel. A five star establishment with a silky smooth maitre d’, lifts to all floors and uniformed door staff greeting your arrival.

There have been a few false dawns over the last 50 years or so.  The Lychgate redevelopment of the Sixties produced the Giffard and more recently the conversion of the old Fownes glove factory on City Walls Road, but none have come remotely near cutting the mustard.

Remember the days when the best hotel in town was the Star in Foregate Street with its revolving entrance door, watering hole for Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, David Bowie etc after their shows on stage at the nearby Gaumont cinema. While just along the A38, Droitwich had the best of the rest, although now the Raven and the Worcestershire are long gone and the Chateau Impney has had its up and downs.

But there was a time when Worcester did have a hotel fit to receive not only the national treasure that was Lord Nelson, but also a future queen in Princess Victoria and she wouldn’t have stayed in any old place.

Sadly hardly anything remains of the building now. The Hop Pole Inn once stood on the corner of Shaw Street and Foregate Street, on the railway station side and opposite Berkeley Hospital almshouses.

Today the plot is occupied by modern offices and the only reminder of the name, for anyone who goes back that far, was the Hop Pole coffee bar over the road in the 1960s. Similar name, very different clientele.

The Hop Pole Inn was first mentioned in St Nicholas parish records in 1742 and in 1749 was described as “newly erected or rebuilt”. By then the city ditch had been filled in and the remains of the old Foregate had disappeared.

The new hotel was very spacious compared with those elsewhere in the city and soon began attracting wealthy county families. The Tories even chose it as their headquarters.

It had a particularly handsome assembly room, which hosted Nelson when he visited Worcester in 1802. However the battered old war hero was in a rather grumpy mood,  complaining about the attitude of “those damn glover-women”, who he believed did not show sufficient respect to his companion Lady Hamilton, a society beauty used to being admired wherever she went.

In 1830 Princess Victoria stayed at the Hop Pole when visiting the Three Choirs Festival, although her appearance drew such large crowds the royal party became worried for her safety.

In 1842, the Hop Pole was taken over by a Mr Scott who had different, but no less lofty, ideas for the building. He soon closed it as a hotel and after considerable alterations to the frontage Victoria House emerged, the most high class shop in the city.

The property then had a succession of owners, among them WK Hogben from London’s New Bond Street, who had it until 1926. But social aspirations gradually declined and in the late 1940s it became a branch of LH Fearis Ltd, local grocers and bakers, who had several shops around Worcester.

Finally, in the late Sixties, the building was converted into offices, particularly being used by estate agents. The footsteps of Victoria and Nelson but a far away echo, as they look for somewhere to stay in Worcester today.