Fountain House Hotel, Church Road, Hayes
Introduction
The photograph on this page of Fountain House Hotel, Church Road, Hayes by Brian Robert Marshall as part of the Geograph project.
The Geograph project started in 2005 with the aim of publishing, organising and preserving representative images for every square kilometre of Great Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man.
There are currently over 7.5m images from over 14,400 individuals and you can help contribute to the project by visiting https://www.geograph.org.uk
Fountain House Hotel, Church Road, Hayes
Image: © Brian Robert Marshall Taken: Unknown
Now a hotel, this used to be a private school where the writer George Orwell (real name Eric Arthur Blair) taught for a time in the early 1930s. The school was known as 'The Hawthorns' and was a private school for boys. It was run simply as a business by its owner and Orwell's opinion of it was very low. He referred to it as 'a dirty swindle' in private correspondence. His view of Hayes itself was not much better. In the same letter he described Hayes as 'one of the most godforsaken places I have ever struck. The population seems to be entirely made up of clerks who frequent tin-roofed chapels on Sundays & for the rest bolt themselves within doors.'* *'George Orwell' by Gordon Bowker, Little, Brown 2003.
Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0
Image Location
Latitude
51.516274
Longitude
-0.419132