Williamstown Royal

The Williamstown Royal artwork celebrates the iconic, once grand location of Williamstown’s Royal Hotel. Beauty, elegance, and mystery still emanate from 85 Nelson Place, over the road from Seaworks.

In researching the Hotel, I discovered its history as a long-term boarding house. During the first World War, many of the tenants were soldiers. Sadly, some never returned to collect their belongings.

The Royal was originally built in 1852 and later replaced in 1893 by the current building. Publican Thomas de Wardt had the new hotel built by Henry Hick to a design by architect T Anthoness. According to the Victorian Heritage Register, it’s “one of the most richly ornamented and highly mannered examples of red brick hotels in Victoria“. I would have to agree, I too am highly mannered.

Today the three-storey interior features 19 period rooms, six bathrooms and five kitchens, and sits on a 973-square-metre block with a deep rear garden extending to Aitken Street.

Features include the elaborate and picturesque treatment of its parapeted gables; twin-arched doors flanking a wider arched bar window with coloured glass; stylised columns; carved scrolls, garlands and pilaster capitals with cherub faces; and elaborate, iron balconettes with Art Nouveau-inspired sunflower motifs. The red brick and stucco building is designed in the Anglo-Dutch (Queen Anne) revival style.

Much of the original internal fabric remains, although hotel elements such as bars have been removed. The original billiard room retains its patterned lantern roof and round, porthole-like windows which pivot open. Other original elements include architraves and the central stair, although the last flight has been altered.

With the Victorian goldrushes of the 1850s Williamstown’s port functions meant that it experienced a tremendous increase in through-traffic as immigrants and interstate travellers disembarked enroute to the fields. No doubt the Royal Hotel provided accommodation to many.

The hotel is of historical significance for its associations with the slum abolition movement of the 1930s. It was cited in the First Progress Report of the Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board in 1937 as one of the most notorious and squalid examples of a de-licensed hotel used for boarding-house accommodation.

Built as superior hotel accommodation, It was de-licensed early in the 20th century and has been used as a boarding house ever since. The building symbolises the rise and decline of a once grand hotel and demonstrates the fate of many de-licensed hotels.

Today its beauty still captures the eye of passers-by, including me, who wish the walls could talk and I could pop inside and have a beer in the grand hotel of yesteryear.

The Williamstown Royal artwork can be ordered in A4, A3, A2, A1 and the super enormous A0.

https://sonsofwilliamstown.com.au/portfolio/djw-hamilton/