Beechwood Hotel & Restaurant - 01692403231

Welcome to the Beechwood Hotel, one of the leading small hotels in the UK

2016 TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence Award

2017 TripAdvisor Travellers' Choice Winner

A special welcome and a friendly and informal atmosphere from the Beechwood hotel

We have eighteen comfortable and well-appointed bedrooms including; Garden and Four-poster Rooms, Classic Double Rooms and Small Double rooms.
Our Garden and Four poster rooms are spacious rooms with Victorian style bathrooms, featuring a freestanding slipper bath, separate walk-in shower & wc. This also includes two Twin bedded Rooms.
Classic rooms come with bath, shower & wc, some with Victorian style bathrooms featuring freestanding baths and separate walk-in shower.
Our smallest but delightful Small Double Rooms are cosy rooms and come with shower & wc
For single guests we offer sole occupancy rates of a double room

Steven our head chef is one of the leading chefs in East Anglia and the AA has awarded his cooking Two Restaurant Rosettes.
Each evening his team of chefs prepare a 'Ten-Mile Dinner' where he sources ingredients, where possible, from within about ten miles of the hotel. Cromer crab, Sheringham lobster and local meat and vegetables are all served in season.
Our restaurant is open every evening for Dinner. We serve lunch Wednesdays to Sundays and Afternoon Teas daily, advance booking is essential.

The Beechwood Hotel makes an ideal touring base for the North Norfolk coast, Norwich and the Broads.
The Norfolk coast line with its sandy beaches, salt marshes and sand dunes are a must see during your stay.
Not forgetting Norwich, voted recently one of the top 10 shopping destinations in the UK. Norwich offers high street names, department stores, independent shops, designer labels, and much much more!!!
After the stresses of touring around and walking the streets of Norwich why not return to us, unpack and unwind with traditional Norfolk Cream tea. Served daily, throughout the afternoon in our Bar and garden lounge





Agatha Christie and the Beechwood

Agatha Christie is the best-selling book writer of all time and with William Shakespeare, the best-selling author of any kind. Only the Bible has sold more than her roughly four billion copies of novels. She is also the most translated individual author, her books have been printed in 103 languages.

Surprisingly, through a chance meeting and then a close and enduring friendship, Agatha had a close association with this house (then known as The Shrubs) which is now the Beechwood Hotel.

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on 15 September 1890 in Torquay to an outgoing American father and a rather shy English mother. On Christmas Eve 1914, after a tempestuous romance, she married Archie Christie an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps.

During Archie's absence at the war, her sister Madge challenged her to write a novel. Completed in 1916. 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles' was first published in the United Sates in 1920. Agatha's success grew and her happiness was complete when her daughter Rosalind was born in 1919. But by 1926, her life was in tatters; her mother had died and Archie left her for another woman.

Slowly Agatha rebuilt her life. Her books became more and more popular and she became a famous author. In 1928, she made her first trip on the Orient Express to Constantinople. Fascinated by the stories she had heard about the archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia (largely modern day Iraq), she travelled on to Bagdad and Ur. There, in the small ex-pat community she met two young British doctors who had graduated from Manchester University, Peter and Margaret McLeod. They became great friends. Margaret and Agatha had a common bond, life was not straight forward for either of them. As one of the first women in the UK to qualify as a doctor, Margaret was working hard to earn respect in a profession that until now had been exclusively the preserve of men. Agatha was a self-employed author, a divorcee and a single mother, not the ideal social position in the England of the 1920s.

In 1936 the McLeods left Mesopotamia and bought the house that is now the Beechwood. Over the next thirty years, Agatha, now re-married to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, stayed many times. She would often come for a month at a time, usually travelling by train and always came on her own. During the day both the McLoeds were working so Agatha would entertain herself and staff have recalled that she spent many hours writing in the summerhouse. In the evening, over dinner, Agatha would discuss possible plots with Peter and Margaret and they were always happy to supply medical information on how for example, poisons worked, to ensure her books were authentic. As a note of thanks she dedicated one of her novels, 'Sad Cypress' to Peter and Margaret.

At the time of this association, she was one of the most famous women in the world but during the time she was in North Walsham she was completely incognito and always used the name Mrs Mallowan.

In 1939 when war broke out, Peter and Margaret were concerned there may be an invasion on the east coast. In her autobiography Agatha records how she drove from Brixham to North Walsham to collect the two youngest McLeod children, David and her god-daughter Crystal and their nanny. On the return journey, she took caffeine tablets to help keep herself awake. David and Crystal then stayed in the relative safety of Greenway, her home on the River Dart, for the early part of the conflict.

Agatha died peacefully at home at Winterbrook House in Wallingford, Oxon on 12 January 1976.

As a twist of fate, Mrs Paine the daughter of Mrs Belson, Agatha's last housekeeper retired to North Walsham and has supplied a fascinating insight into her later years.

We have a full set of Agatha Christie novels and a collection of photographs and personal letters written by her to the McLeods and Mrs Belson which are available for guests to peruse.

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