2-16 Gordon Road

Cliftonville

Above photo showing staff and guests circa 1910.

Above photo showing staff and guests circa 1910.

Above photo, circa 1930.

I am not sure whether this had a drinks license, but being a private hotel you would have had to have been a resident or guest to have access anyway.

The Hereward Hotel was established around 1893 by Herbert Epps and he ran the hotel until 1923. The hotel occupied numbers 2, 4 and 6 Gordon Road, Cliftonville and by 1897 it had expanded by adding numbers 8,10,12, and 14!

In 1923 the group Hereward and Kingsley took over and added, 16, 18 and 20, this now being half of the block on the east side of Gordon Road. The Kingsley Hotel was in the adjacent Road, Edgar Road.

The 1921 census however suggests that they were running the premises as early as 1921 and they had 59 employees in that year.

In the 1940s to 1980's it was numbered 2-16 Gordon Road, and was converted into flats in the early 1990's and named Hereward House.

The name Hereward refers to Hereward the Wake circa 1035– 1072, also known as Hereward the Outlaw or Hereward the Exile. He was an Anglo-Saxon nobleman and a leader of local resistance to the Norman Conquest of England. His base, when leading the rebellion against the Norman rulers, was the Isle of Ely in East Anglia. According to legend he roamed the Fens, covering North Cambridgeshire, Southern Lincolnshire and West Norfolk, leading popular opposition to William the Conqueror.

From an email received 18 July 2023. My name is Katja Kühn from Germany. While looking through my great-grandmother`s collection of photographs, letters, postcards and so on I found a flyer, which maybe is interesting for you. The son of my great-grandmother, Hans-Georg Kersten, and his wife used to live in Great Britain. In the 1960/1970‘s they ran two hotels there. One of them was Hereward Hotel in Cliftonville. Above photo of Hans-Georg, taken at Christmas 1949. Because I was interested, I researched on the internet and so I found your web page. Unfortunately I do not know much about my second cousin Hans-Georg. His father died before I was born. Hans-Georg‘s wife and his mother Margarete have not been getting along with each other, and so Hans-Georg has broken off contact with his mother. And me, a little girl living in the G.D.R., had no chance to get in contact with him. The only thing I know is that he – just like his mother - died in 1989. I hope you’ll enjoy the two files and find them interesting. Have a good time and thank you for your interesting work! Best rewards, Katja Kühn.

LICENSEE LIST

EPPS Herbert 1893+

KERSTEN Hans George 1960s