Hotel

Thomas Cook travel agent. Autograph Note Signed to lithographic illustration of his ‘Leicester Temperance Hall and Hotel / Designed by J. Medland Esq. Gloucester’.

réf. 25008 — Without date or place but docketed in another hand on the reverse including years 1866 and 1867. See Cook’s entry in the Oxford DNB. His temperance hall and hotel illustrated here were built in 1853. The hall was demolished in the 1960s to be replaced by a building typical of those that blight Leicester in 2011; the council gave permission for the hotel to be demolished to make way for another monstrosity. Sepia lithograph printed in landscape on 20 x 13 cm leaf of laid paper extracted from a book or pamphlet. Attractive illustration of an imposing structure with those that flank it and people and coaches in the foreground. Cook’s inscription is written lengthwise and upwards in the right-hand margin. The handwriting is difficult: ‘adopt the scene you have sent / once The I’ll track for post port / Yours very truly / Thos Cook’. Docketed in another hand on the reverse: ‘No 1 / grants. / 2 Bills for 1866 - paid in /67 / 3 Shingleton Bill -’. Without date or place, but docketed in another hand on the reverse, including years 1866 and 1867. unknown