RICHMOND is famed for its ancient castle and market place, its superb station and its picturesque riverside.

But Memories has long believed that the Fleece Hotel is the town’s best building. The 21-bedroom hotel shut suddenly a couple of weeks ago and this week has been put on the market for £250,000 – surely a bargain for such a brilliant building.

The original Fleece in Friars Wynd, near the Georgian Theatre, was described as an “ancient hostel” in a newspaper report in February 1897. It may have been recently damaged by a fire and, said the Darlington and Stockton Times (D&ST), the owners, brewery Robert Fenwick and Company of Sunderland, had called in Darlington architect GG Hoskins to create a new hotel in the “Scotch baronial style”.

Fenwick had started brewing in Sunderland in 1770 and ceased brewing in 1964 when it was part of Flowers Breweries.

In 1896, Fenwick owned 63 licensed houses across the North-East including, said the D&ST, the “handsome and recently-erected” Kings Head Hotel in Darlington.

The Kings Head opened in 1893 and had been designed by architect Hoskins – in fact, it is probably the pick of his illustrious Gothic career which includes Darlington library, technical college, sixth form college and Middlesbrough Town Hall. From 1868 to 1878, he also designed distinctive branches of Backhouses Bank (now Barclays) in Sunderland, Bishop Auckland, Middlesbrough and Barnard Castle.

The site of the Fleece in Richmond allowed Hoskins’ imagination to run wild. The old “ancient hostel” had been bottled up in Friars Wynd, but in 1887, Victoria Road – named after the queen’s Golden Jubilee – had been opened out, replacing an old track, and so Hoskins was able to design the new hotel to front on to this new main thoroughfare.

“It is sure to prove not only an ornament to the street architecture of the old town but a thoroughly up to date hotel,” said the D&ST in 1897.

The sole contractor was Thomas Stairmand and Son of Darlington, and we guess the hotel was ready for 1898.

Architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, in his 1966 guide to the buildings of North Yorkshire, described it as “an extravaganza of brick and terracotta with tourelles” – a tourelle being a turret which projects out of the wall.

It is indeed an extravaganza. We hope its next owners treat it well.

IN last week’s Memories we had a close-up of a snow-covered car parked beneath Richmond Castle in January 1960. With a covering of the white stuff, it made a distinctive outline. But what, we asked, was it?

John Biggs from Bishop Auckland led the charge and several other callers agreed. It is probably an Austin Ten Four (that’s ten horsepower and four cylinders), made between 1932 and 1947, and it’s possibly a saloon version called a Lichfield that was made in the mid-1930s.

MANY thanks to everyone who got in touch following last week's story about the Doctors Tunnel – we will be returning to Bishop Auckland in a future week. In the article we got on to Italian ice cream makers. Zair’s cafe in Bishop Auckland was opened more than 100 years ago under the name of Joseph Rea, who had emigrated from Arpino in central Italy. We said that the family of guitarist Chris Rea, “of the lemontops shop in Redcar”, hailed from the same place.

Marie Lloyd emailed to point out: “Lemontops are a speciality of Pacitto's in Redcar and Chris Rea belongs to another ice cream family.” She’s right. The lemontop – a blob of lemon sorbet on the top of a vanilla ice cream cone – is indeed the signature dish of Pacitto’s.