The OldBell

Abbot Walter raised a guest house beside Malmesbury Abbey around 1220, on the site of a demolished castle, and the building has lodged travellers more or less ever since — an inn from the Dissolution, the Castle Inn until 1798, the Old Bell thereafter, and by the operator's own carefully hedged phrase 'rumoured to be England's oldest hotel'. Since March 2021 it has belonged to Whit and Kim Hanks, Texan hospitality owners who bought it outright and refurbished its thirty-four rooms in a deliberately eclectic style that has one boot in Wiltshire and one in Texas. Grade I listed, chain-free, and run as the singular thing it is.