The Duke of Cornwall Hotel has watched Plymouth change around it for over 160 years. Built in Victorian Gothic style using five different types of stone, it opened in 1865 on a site previously occupied by the Saracens Head Public House and Millbay Grove Terrace, cleared at a total development cost of £40,000. The architect was C. Forster Hayward, who later applied the same style on a smaller scale to the Swyddfa’r Sir in Aberystwyth. Construction work was carried out by “Honest” John Pethick of Messers Hall and Pethick, a builder already well known to the South Devon Railway Company for completing projects including the rebuilding of Exeter St Thomas and Newton Abbot railway stations.
A Hotel Built for the Railway Age
The first steam train reached the now-closed Plymouth Millbay railway station on 2 April 1849. The rise in first-class rail and sea travel that followed created demand for quality accommodation, and a group of railway directors formed the hotel’s original board. By the 1920s the number of ocean liner calls at Plymouth had doubled from 350 to 700 a year. Passengers found that disembarking at Plymouth rather than continuing to Southampton could save an entire day’s travel back to London, and the hotel benefited directly from that passing trade. During that period it was modernised with electric lighting, a new lift and improved sanitary arrangements certified by the local authority. The celebrity visitors who came through Millbay Docks during the 1930s included Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, Duke Ellington and Bing Crosby, as liner traffic reached its peak.
Survival, History and Preservation
One of the more sombre chapters in the hotel’s history came in April 1912, when twenty stewardesses who had survived the sinking of the RMS Titanic spent their first night back on English soil here. That connection was marked by an exhibition at the hotel in 2017. During the Second World War, the Plymouth Blitz left the building undamaged while much of the surrounding city was destroyed, and it continued to host regular functions throughout the conflict. The 1970s and early 1980s brought a different kind of threat, when closure looked possible. It was partly the public praise of poet laureate John Betjeman for the hotel’s architecture that helped build the case for saving it, and a major refurbishment followed. The hotel remains in Plymouth city centre, in Devon, England, as one of the few Victorian Gothic structures in the city to have survived intact.