Chester Accommodation

With the George Borrow Society’s Chester weekend coming up, having let us know you are coming, you’ll probably be looking for accommodation.

The venues will be in the centre of Chester, in Northgate street (by the Cathedral) and Fordham street (other side of the Cathedral).  Both are a short walk from the bus station so if you wanted accommodation a bit further out and had a bus service in, you’d be fine.  There is car parking in central Chester but on the Friday night and Saturday morning it’s likely to fill quickly, so you’ll need to plan ahead a bit.

Warning: the writer has never stayed in any Chester hotel, and cannot vouch for any of them!

Some Borrovians may wish to stay at the Pied Bull Inn, in Northgate street, which is where Borrow and family stayed in 1854.  The inn is a very old building and quite charming and we hope to have the Saturday evening meal there.

The Chester Tourism Website (Visit Chester) allows you to search their database to find suitable accommodation.  It’s not too obvious how to use it: scroll to the bottom of the page, enter the arrival date in the box provided (probably Friday 11 October 2019), number of nights, and in the area box select Chester within 3 miles.  You can use the other options to refine further and then click the Search button to see what comes up: it can take some time for the results to appear.

Chester Tourism don’t seem to have many hotels etc. listed so you might like to know that there are some large chain ones near the railway station: they’d be a 10 to 15 minute walk from our venues, or you can catch the railway bus to Chester bus station (approximately every 10 minutes, price around £1 single).  Options are the Hallmark, Best Western, Stafford Hotel, The Queen etc.  There’s also a few cheap guest houses near the station, such as The Bunkroom and Lloyds of Chester.

The well-known cheaper hotel chains are also represented with a Holiday Inn Express near the race-course (about 10 minute walk to venues), a Premier Inn near the railway station, and two Travelodges: one by the Roman Gardens and one just down the road in Bridge Street — both about 5 minutes’ walk from venues.

If you have transport and want something more upmarket, The Grosvenor at Pulford is very elegant and offers car parking.  There are buses into Chester but you’d probably want to drive from there.  We’ll pass it on our Sunday coach trip as Borrow went past it and didn’t mention it.  There are also so very upmarket hotels in central Chester (not listed above).

There’s two camping sites nearby (again transport a must): Netherwood Touring Site and Chester Lakes — both comes with grass and trees, which the above don’t.