The Angel Croft Hotel, Lichfield and Thursday thoughts.

A few months ago, on one of our lovely early evening family walks, we stopped and had a look at the gorgeous architecture of the long vacant Angel Croft Hotel. As we see so often in towns, a lovely building in a prime location is slowly decaying to dereliction, partly due to recession hampering refurbishment and vandalism.

The building is Grade II listed, dating back to 1750 with some excellent railing works and all round design. 

Looking at the building, it's a sorry state. Broken into countless times, and with water damage caused by stolen copper pipes, paint flaking and grounds overgrown, it's a sad sight indeed.

My wife asked if I would buy it for her (and only half jokingly it seemed), and if I could I would. If I had a lot of money in fact, there are many places I can think of that I'd buy and restore. Hopefully, the hotel will find a backer and be refurbished before it's too late.

From the back, it could look worse. Notice how many different sized windows there are! 

Peeping through the letterbox, the interior looks almost untouched, although most things have been taken now.

I'll try and get down there again this week to update on the condition of the building, a wet summer won't have helped and I fear it's probably going to look even worse.

In other, completely unrelated news, I was woken up today by my wife excitedly telling me that my favourite NFL team, the San Francisco 49ers, will be playing at Wembley Stadium next October, and that I *will* be going. That got my day off to an excellent start I can tell you. I've been following American Football for over 25 of my 39 years, and so I'm very excited as it's only the second time I will have seen my team in all that time, and the first time in a truly competitive, meaningful game. More on this in later posts.