The former Great North Western Hotel is on the east side of Lime Street

Lime Street, Liverpool

Lime Street in Liverpool, England was created as a street in 1790. Its most famous feature is Lime Street Station. It is part of the William Brown Street conservation area....

, Liverpool

Liverpool

Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...

, England. It has been designated by English Heritage

English Heritage

English Heritage . is an executive non-departmental public body of the British Government sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport...

 a a Grade II listed building.

History

The hotel was built in in 1879 as a railway hotel by the London and North Western Railway

London and North Western Railway

The London and North Western Railway was a British railway company between 1846 and 1922. It was created by the merger of three companies – the Grand Junction Railway, the London and Birmingham Railway and the Manchester and Birmingham Railway...

 to serve Lime Street Station

Liverpool Lime Street railway station

Liverpool Lime Street is a railway station serving the city centre of Liverpool, England. The station lies on a branch of the West Coast Main Line from London Euston, and on the Wirral Line of the Merseyrail network...

. It was designed by Alfred Waterhouse

Alfred Waterhouse

Alfred Waterhouse was a British architect, particularly associated with the Victorian Gothic Revival architecture. He is perhaps best known for his design for the Natural History Museum in London, and Manchester Town Hall, although he also built a wide variety of other buildings throughout the...

, and contained 330 rooms. The hotel closed in 1933 and remained empty and unused for over 60 years. In 1994 it was bought by John Moores University

Liverpool John Moores University

Liverpool John Moores University is a British 'modern' university located in the city of Liverpool, England. The university is named after John Moores and was previously called Liverpool Mechanics' School of Arts and later Liverpool Polytechnic before gaining university status in 1992, thus...

 and, at a cost of £6 million, was converted into a hall of residence for students, which opened in 1996.

Architecture

The building is constructed in stone with a slate

Slate

Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. The result is a foliated rock in which the foliation may not correspond to the original sedimentary layering...

 roof in French Renaissance

French Renaissance architecture

French Renaissance architecture is the style of architecture which was imported to France from Italy during the early 16th century and developed in the light of local architectural traditions....

 style. It has five storeys, a basement and an attic, and is in 21 bays

Bay (architecture)

A bay is a unit of form in architecture. This unit is defined as the zone between the outer edges of an engaged column, pilaster, or post; or within a window frame, doorframe, or vertical 'bas relief' wall form.-Defining elements:...

. The end bays and the bays flanking the three-bay centre are carried up into towers. The central entrance is round-arched, and is flanked by Doric

Doric order

The Doric order was one of the three orders or organizational systems of ancient Greek or classical architecture; the other two canonical orders were the Ionic and the Corinthian.-History:...

columns.