The Golden Lion is a Wetherspoon’s pub with accommodation upstairs. It has an excellent location in the centre of Rochester and it offers a high standard of accommodation for a reasonable price and has more character than your average chain hotel.
Wetherspoon is known mostly for its pubs (there are almost 1000 of them across the United Kingdom) but they also run hotels with around 4–5% of Wetherspoon pubs having hotel accommodation attached.
While Wetherspoons pubs share many similarities such as a common menu, they wouldn’t be successful if they were identical and the company goes to great lengths to ensure that their pubs and hotels have an individual feel. They even go as far as having bespoke carpet designed for each hotel at an average cost of £40,000 per establishment. Because of these efforts, even though it is part of a large corporate chain, the Golden Lion feels very much like a small independent hotel.
The hotel’s nine guest rooms all have comfortable beds, a flatscreen television, tea and coffee-making facilities and en suite bathrooms with a bath and shower.
Pubs with on-site accommodation can be a bit hit and miss although the accommodation at Wetherspoon’s pubs has a certain degree of consistency that you get when the pub is run by a large business. The in-room decor is a bit too pub-like for some people who may find it a little dated, although it is cleaner and better maintained than most other hotels with a similar style of decor.
The pub downstairs has a little more character than your typical Spoons pub with a traditional pub atmosphere that is also a little cheaper than other pubs in Rochester. It opens earlier than most other pubs and a lot of people pop in for coffee (with free refills) or a traditional breakfast (just £4.99, or £6.59 for a large breakfast) in the morning but it becomes more pub-like by lunchtime. Like other pubs run by Wetherspoons, it has some good value food specials but the standard is hardly in the same league as a more expensive gastropub.
The Golden Lion is at the southeastern end of Rochester’s High Street and it’s only a one-minute walk to Eastgate House. Other points of interest in Rochester, including the Guildhall Museum, the Huguenot Museum, Rochester Castle and Rochester Cathedral, are no more than a 10-minute walk away.
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