Our town through time: a brief history of Chesterfield's Portland Hotel and Market Place Station

A heritage guide to Chesterfield with historian Philip Riden

Transcript

00:00Hello, I'm Philip Ryden. I'm a retired member of the staff of the History Department of Nottingham University.

00:06I have a long-standing interest in the history of Chesterfield, my hometown.

00:10We're going to have a look at some of the more interesting buildings in the town centre this morning,

00:14and I'll say something about the history of each of them.

00:17I'm standing in front of the Hotel Portland on West Bars in Chesterfield.

00:21This was built in 1899 as a railway hotel.

00:25There's no sign of a railway there today, but it was the terminus of the Lancashire, Derbyshire and East Coast Railway,

00:32the railway that famously never reached Lancashire or the East Coast.

00:36It ran from Chesterfield to just outside Lincoln.

00:40It was opened around the same time as the hotel. It closed in 1951, having been plagued with subsidence.

00:46The station that was built here, because it was the headquarters of the railway company,

00:50was by far the grandest of Chesterfield's three Victorian stations.

00:54It stood to the right of the hotel, although the two were designed by different architects.

01:00After the station closed, it was used as a shop for some years, and then demolished in 1973.

01:07The hotel survives, traditionally Chesterfield's two-star hotel.

01:12It's now a residential Wetherspoons house, which has been renovated reasonably faithfully to the original design.

01:20There is a Civic Society plaque on the building setting out its history.

01:24There is also a mountain with a tall building at a hotel, where the hotspot was proposed to the casket.

01:26So the station was built at one place, but the station was built for the city of the啦.

01:28It's now a residential building at the hotel.

01:30It was a residential building at the same time.

01:32The building at the south of Chile, the city was built for a historic city of 해�

01:32which was built the west of the city of Los Angeles, which was built for a building.

01:35In the neighborhood, the city was built in the duplocations, which was built by the building.

01:37The home of the city of the city of Los Angeles is built in the city of the city of London.

01:38The parking lot of the city of the land is built in the city of the city.