The Red Lion Hotel

The Red Lion Hotel on Colchester High Street began as a house built around 1470, with its main street-facing timber-framed block, featuring a central carriage entrance, added around 1500 when the property was converted into an inn. A 1987 structural survey commissioned by Essex County Council examined the building's timber-framed carpentry and identified a probable construction date range of 1480 to 1550. Later alterations were made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with further restoration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The building has been a Grade I listed structure since 1950, recognised for its richly ornamented late medieval and early Tudor architecture, including surviving traceried window panels and carved spandrels.