Promenade, Rex Hotel (Waverley Hotel)

Seventy-bedroom hotel on The Promenade. Once home to a popular folk club. A host of well known musicians played here in the early days of their careers, including Gerry Rafferty, Billy Connolly, Ralph McTell and Lindisfarne, who 'came home' for the club's 1970 Christmas party following the release of their first album, "Nicely Out of Tune". The hotel had quite small beginnings. In December 1906 the Waverley Hotel Company submitted a planning application for a temperence hotel. It was one of a chain, the others being located in Barrow, Whitehaven and Penrith. Over the next ten years, the Waverley Hotel swallowed up the neighbouring houses on the Promenade and vacant land on South Parade. A 1920s pamphlet described the Waverley as one of the largest and most up-to-date private residential hotels on the North East coast. It then had 150 bedrooms and a heated garage. Behind there was a private tennis court. In 1937 the hotel obtained a license to sell alcohol for the first time and about the same time changed its name to the Rex Hotel. LOCAL LIST