Skindles

Skindles was a hotel in Maidenhead, England, on the Buckinghamshire bank of the River Thames by Maidenhead Bridge. Formerly the Orkney Arms, built in 1743, it was turned from a coaching inn into a fashionable hotel by William Skindle in 1833. In the 20th century, it became notorious as a place for adulterous assignations. Its guests included Winston Churchill and Princess Margaret, and musicians who performed there included The Rolling Stones and The Strawbs. The hotel appears in the film Kind Hearts and Coronets. Skindles is mentioned in the play Journey's End by R. C. Sherriff: 'We danced a bit at Skindles, and drank a lot of port and muck'.

A property developer bought the site in 2006 for just over £30m, but Irish Nationwide bank took it over in 2009 to try to recover a £40m loan; the property was then transferred to Irish bank NAMA. Barratt Homes and the National Grid then secured an option for most of the site for a joint development project involving housing and a hotel. South Bucks council adopted a residential-led development brief in July 2013 but argued that it would prefer Skindles Hotel itself to be renovated; any demolition proposals would need to be "robustly justified".

As of summer 2013, the hotel's condition had begun to fall further into disrepair, with parts of the roof beginning to cave in and collapse under the repeated weathering caused by the recent hard winters that hit the UK. The building had been derelict from about the mid-1990s.

The hotel's site was put up for sale by in November 2013, after Barratt's option expired. It was bought by housebuilder Berkeley Group in February 2014.

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