The Lygon Arms

The Lygon Arms has stood on Broadway's broad street since the sixteenth century, an old coaching inn of honey stone that has been taking in travellers for something close to four hundred years. It is a hotel now, with a spa and a pool behind it, but the front of it is unchanged, and the rooms still carry the low beams and wide hearths of the building's first life.

It has a habit of turning up in history. Both Charles I and Oliver Cromwell are said to have lodged here, Cromwell on the night before the Battle of Worcester in 1651, which means the two men slept under the same roof at opposite ends of the same war.

It sits at the centre of Broadway, the showpiece village of the northern Cotswolds, and it has watched the street fill and empty with visitors for as long as there have been visitors to watch.

An old inn keeps its counsel the way an old village does. It has seen everyone through, the famous and the hunted and the merely tired, and it has never been in the business of saying which was which.