Arrival Date: 2012-11-23
Departure Date: 2012-11-25
Accommodation: Mercure Telford, Madeley Court
Another late arrival on a Friday night due to work commitments found us in Telford at around 10pm. The hotel itself looked beautiful, but unfortunately that’s the only good thing about this hotel. We checked in to our room, which was perfectly adequate, then went to get a drink from the bar before bed.
The bar area was a mess, the counter was completely full of used glasses (maybe 200 of them), and there were only a couple of clean tables. Helen sat down while I went to find someone that could serve us a drink. It took them about half an hour to deliver a cup of tea and a diet coke to us, at which point we took a couple of sips and then went to bed.
In the morning, we woke up nice and early to get breakfast. Breakfast was adequate, but they kept running out of food causing long waits (we had to wait 10 minutes for more sausages to arrive!). We went back to the room to get ready for the day, Helen had a bath, after which I jumped in the shower. Unfortunately, the controls on the shower didn’t allow any good mixing, so the water was either boiling hot or ice cold; I burnt myself in the shower, and would walk around for the rest of the weekend with what looked like sunburn all over my body. Naturally we complained to the front-desk and they moved our room, upgrading us to a suite in the process, but more on that later.
We set off for Ironbridge in the morning, which is a beautiful little village by the River Severn. We parked up over the river from the village centre and walked over the iron bridge itself (for which the village is named) to get there. Despite it being a bit misty, the scenery was beautiful, and we spent some time in the museum learning about the iron bridge and village life back in the day.
After some more walking around, we stopped in at The White Hart, a lovely little B&B / restaurant, and had a fantastic lunch. Once we’d finished, we made our way back to the car via a couple more shops. Inspired by the iron bridge, I bought a big book of engineering, that I sat reading in the hotel room in the evening.
Once we got back to the car, we made our way to Blists Hill Victorian Town, a large open-air museum, a re-created Victorian town. We went to the bank and exchanged our money for “old money”; pounds, shillings, and pence, then walked around the town itself. We visited the pharmacy, bought some sweets at the sweet shop, watched a blacksmith forge some tools, and took a trip down an old coal mine!
One the way back out, we stopped in The New Inn, an old Victorian pub, for a quick drink, and changed our shillings back to real money. It was a brilliant experience, and a very well set out museum, we’d recommend this to anyone that happens to be in the area.
We got back to the hotel at around 5:30pm, and they had a new room set up for us. We went to check it out, a little wet from the rainy weather to find it freezing cold with no functioning heating. We got an electric heater delivered to the room after 20 minutes and put it on full-pelt to try and dry some of our clothes and footwear before going out for dinner.
With wet shoes, we went for a drive round Telford to see what we could find for dinner, and after getting lost a couple of times, we rolled in to a Marston’s pub called The Severn Gorge. Food was pretty good, standard stuff for a Marston’s, we knew what to expect. Afterwards, we went back to the hotel.
Back at the hotel, Helen had a bath again, and more trouble unfolded as the hairdryer didn’t work. Eventually, I sat down with the duty manager and discussed all the issues with the stay, he agreed it was all unacceptable, and said the general manager would be on in the morning to discuss a reduced rate with me upon checkout.
Tired and defeated, we went to bed to read and get some sleep ready for the next day.
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