Stanton House Hotel

The hotel is owned by Honda, which has a large manufacturing plant nearby, and a large portion of its guests consist of Honda staff visiting from Japan. It succeeds in giving its largely Japanese clientele a quintessential English country house experience while catering to Japanese tastes.

The hotel’s 78 guest rooms all have comfortable beds, a work desk, a flat-screen television, a fridge, tea and coffee making facilities and an en suite bathroom. Rooms range from fairly basic single rooms to the more opulent Swan and Cotswold rooms that both feature a large four-poster bed. However, the decor in the rooms is a little tired and could do with an update.

The hotel’s Rosemary restaurant looks out over Stanton Lake and serves both British and Japanese dishes and on Thursday evenings it has an all-you-can-eat Japanese buffet. Our advice is to stick to the Japanese food, which is probably the best in Wiltshire, but steer clear of any British food on the menu which, according to reports from other guests, is for the most part inedible.

There is free Wi-Fi wireless internet access throughout the hotel but reports from other guests suggest that the standard of Wi-Fi access varies wildly depending on which room you are staying in.

The hotel is in Stanton Fitzwarren, a lovely village just outside Swindon that has a parish church dating from Norman times but not a lot of other amenities, not even a village pub. It is around a 15–20-minute walk from the South Marston Industrial Estate, which not only has a big Honda plant but also large Aldi, Amazon and DHL warehouse facilities. Despite the thousands of people who must work in these businesses, there is very little here in the way of places to eat and drink.

The hotel and Stanton Fitzwarren are both around a 25-minute drive from Swindon’s town centre and while you could walk into town in 1½ hours, the best option, if you’re not driving, is to take the 15-minute walk to a bus stop outside the DHL distribution centre in the industrial estate and then take Stagecoach bus route 7 into the town centre. This bus runs every 12 minutes and has a journey time of around 20 minutes.