150 Up with Michael Grange @ The Randolph

Later this year our iconic hotel will celebrate its 150th birthday. It was fitting then to be sent a menu from a 1901 dinner of the Metropolitan Railway Carriage & Wagon Company held at the Randolph, and I am keen to find out what other memories our local residents may have of the hotel.

The menu from the annual dinner, which was held at the Randolph on Saturday, July 6, 1901, featured five courses where all the meal options had been written in French – as was the style at the time. Guests could choose from Homard Au Naturel (lobster), Quartier d’Agneau Roti (roast lamb) and Compote de Poires et Crème (pear compote and cream).

The old menu was donated anonymously, but it made me wonder if there might be other memorabilia in the region. I hope that there might be other pieces of history in the area and would encourage people to come to the hotel and share their memories with us, so that we can create a memory wall within the hotel to celebrate the hotel’s momentous birthday.

Receiving this menu was a wonderful surprise and a reminder that the Randolph has played a huge part in the lives of people in and around Oxfordshire over its many years. We have been trying to investigate the history of the hotel and this is a wonderful additional to our collection. The history of the building is fascinating.

The Randolph Hotel was named after the Rev Dr Francis Randolph, the 18th-century cleric who was a chief benefactor of the Ashmolean. The hotel was built in 1864 by William Wilkinson to help with the city’s accommodation needs for the notables visiting with the Prince and Princess of Wales on their planned trip to Oxford two years later.

A ballroom was added in 1899, which was subsequently used as a temporary hospital for injured soldiers during the First World War. The ground floor was amended in 1923 and an extension was completed in the 1950s, adding 60 additional rooms.

There are still a number of antiques around the building, including a grandfather clock in te Morse Bar, which was manufactured by Rowell’s of Oxford and is believed to date back to the 1850s. The chandelier, now hanging in the main lounge, was originally purchased in Venice in 1919 and has been hanging there since it was renovated in 1950.

The hotel recently enjoyed a £6.5m refurbishment following a fire over a year ago and is now returned to its former glory. Part of the renovations included the opening of our new Acanthus restaurant and Cartoon Bar. The new 90-seat Acanthus bistro features mouth-watering filet of beef au poivre, which also featured on the 1901 menu.

The new Cartoon Bar, named after the numerous cartoon images from the past 150 years which hang on its walls, has more than a dozen champagnes and 35 types of gin.

Over the years the Macdonald Randolph Hotel has welcomed a number of famous guests, including King Alfonso of Spain, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Farouk of Egypt; politicians – Bill and Hillary Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto; and actors such as Sir Alec Guinness, Hugh Grant, Maureen Lipman, and of course the cast and production teams of Morse and Lewis who have filmed in the hotel.

We have had so many people stay with us over the years and we really hope that some have kept a token of their time with us at the Randolph – it would be wonderful to share that trip down memory lane with them at this special time in the hotel’s history.

GO THERE
Macdonald Randolph Hotel
Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2LN
0344 879 9132