Two people slept or performed at the Angel who are worth stopping for: a king running out of options, and the most famous actress of the age. Neither would recognise the building now, because it was rebuilt in 1938, but the address has been an inn for a very long time and the stories attach to the place rather than the brickwork.
The King, June 1645
Charles I came to Bewdley twice during the Civil War. In June 1644 he stayed three days at Tickenhill, the old royal house on the hill, and attended the service in the town’s chapel with the Bailiff’s seat set aside for him.
The second visit is the one that matters. On 17 and 18 June 1645 he was in Bewdley again, and this time he slept at the Angel.
The date is worth sitting with. Naseby had been fought on 14 June, three days earlier, and it had destroyed his field army and, with it, any realistic prospect of winning the war. The King spent the following weeks moving through the Marches trying to raise fresh troops that were never going to come. So the man who slept here was not a monarch on progress. He was a commander who had just lost everything and had not yet admitted it, passing through a small river town that had rung its bells for his nephew two years before.
Sarah Siddons
By the eighteenth century the Angel had a fashionable Assembly Room, which is what a prosperous town used for concerts, balls, meetings and performances. Sarah Siddons is said to have played there.
Siddons was the outstanding tragic actress of her generation and the most celebrated performer on the English stage, a woman whose Lady Macbeth was a national event. She came from a travelling theatrical family and played provincial circuits for years before London made her famous, so an appearance at a Worcestershire assembly room is entirely plausible. It is worth saying that the claim comes to us through the town’s own historian rather than from a playbill, and a playbill would settle it.
The building
The Angel was rebuilt in 1938. That means the room Charles I slept in and the assembly room Siddons played in are both gone, and what stands today is a twentieth century building on a very old site.
This is worth saying plainly rather than glossing over, because a good deal of heritage writing lets readers assume more antiquity than a building actually has. The Angel’s history is real. Its fabric is not medieval, and pretending otherwise would be the easy and dishonest option.
Nor is it an inn any more. The building is now a Tesco. That is the sort of detail heritage writing tends to leave out, and leaving it out would be a kind of lie, because a visitor standing on Load Street looking for the place the King slept is going to find a supermarket and deserves to be told so first.
What it says about the town
An inn with an assembly room, on a main street of a river port, hosting travelling players and taking in a king: that is the shape of a town that mattered more than its size suggests. Bewdley in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had money, traffic and consequence. The Angel is where a fair amount of it was spent.
Two hundred and fifty years of that, and the site now sells groceries. There is no moral in it. Buildings earn their living however the age allows, and a coaching inn that has become a supermarket is only doing what the Shambles did when it stopped being a butchers’ row.