Mercure Oxford Eastgate Hotel

The Mercure Oxford Eastgate Hotel occupies two seventeenth-century townhouses framed by a stone facade that sits right at the edge of the old city wall. Its most famous guest, J.R.R. Tolkien, frequented the building during his time as a professor at Oxford. He often met with friends in the bar to discuss literature and language. The heavy timber beams and low ceilings inside the lobby still hold the atmosphere of those mid-century gatherings, long before the structure became a modern hotel.