Hotels in Shrewsbury

Shrewsbury's compact centre, wrapped almost entirely by the River Severn, makes location a genuinely useful thing to think about before booking. Stay inside the loop, on streets like Wyle Cop, Dogpole or around the Square, and you can walk to the castle, museum, Abbey and every restaurant without touching a car again until you leave; several of the town's oldest coaching inns occupy exactly this ground, their beams and sloping floors part of the appeal. Move a little further out and you trade a few minutes' walk for country-house grounds, spas and easier parking, particularly at the handful of manor and hall hotels that ring the town on the roads towards Ellesmere, Battlefield and the Welsh border.

Budget matters too. Shrewsbury has a genuine spread from simple, well-run guest houses in Georgian townhouses on the fringes of the centre through to four-star country hotels with restaurants of their own. Business travellers and those attending events at the nearby showground or Shrewsbury Sixth Form tend to favour the edge-of-town hotels close to the A5 and A49, where parking is straightforward and the motorway network is minutes away. Couples and short-break visitors, meanwhile, usually get more from a night or two inside the loop, where the medieval streets are lit at dusk and everything of interest is within a ten-minute stroll. Whichever you choose, book ahead for the Flower Show weekend in August and during the main summer school holidays, when the town's limited stock of central rooms fills quickly.