10 lesser-known alternatives to Britain’s most popular hotels

Britain’s hotel scene is flying high, with big-name openings and cult hotel groups spiffing up old stately estates and reinventing historic inns across the country. While the country’s best-loved hotels are popular for good reason, there is plenty to see beyond the headline-hitters. And with some rooms these days coming in at well above £1,000 a night or requiring a Glastonbury-style booking strategy to get one, it’s the under-the-radar alternatives that you want to know about.

Whether swerving the obvious honeypot destinations, squirrelling out a lesser known spin-off or simply offering a stylish stand-in at a cracking price, these are the places to seek out for an off-the-beaten-track break. The kind of spots – whether a grown-up, art-filled Highland lodge or a dialled-up foodie hub in the West Midlands – that you’ll be recommending to friends long after you check out.

The Abbey Inn, Byland, North Yorkshire

Instead of: The Black Swan at Oldstead, North Yorkshire

Chef Tommy Banks’ family have farmed in and around Oldstead for generations. In 2006, they bought The Black Swan, transforming it into a now Michelin-starred restaurant with rooms fed by their 160-acre farm. Last May, Banks added this handsome pub to the fold – which also includes restaurant Roots in York (also starred).

Easier to get a table at and with no tasting menu, hyper-local produce still rules the roost, including meat from their Dexter cattle, rare-breed pigs and Herdwick sheep, plus vegetables from the kitchen garden. This might be whipped up into smoked pablo beetroot with ewe’s curd and preserved yorkshire rhubarb or the signature burger, made with Dexter chuck brisket and short rib.

The Sunday roast is worth crossing counties for: pork belly with pig cheek toad in the hole, roast leg of Herdwick lamb or salt-aged sirloin of beef. The three bedrooms upstairs – overlooking the gothic ruins of Byland Abbey – are decorated by Tommy’s mother Anne with cushions and blankets from ethical Yorkshire woollen brand Bronte by Moon and toiletries from Harrogate’s H2K Botanicals beside the roll-top baths.

Doubles from £375 including £100 towards dinner and breakfast (01347 868204; abbeyinnbyland.co.uk)

Careys Manor, Hampshire

Instead of: Lime Wood, Hampshire

Lime Wood’s Herb House spa leans into its New Forest surroundings, perhaps most in its spa, with woody views and a treatment menu dedicated to natural wellbeing. Just down the road at Careys Manor, the SenSpa looks a little further afield for its inspiration, drawing on ancient Thai rituals (massages from £115) and Eastern wellbeing practices. There’s also comprehensive water and thermal therapies: a crystal steam room, rhassoul mud room, herbal sauna, ice room, laconicum and tepidarium.

Most transportative of all is the alphasphere, where sound, colour, light, vibration and aromatherapy lull you into a state of deep relaxation from your futuristic pod. Elsewhere three restaurants globetrot from Thailand (Zen Garden) via Paris (Le Blaireau) back to British shores (Cambium). The most charming bedrooms are in the 1888-built manor house (there are also ones overlooking the garden in a more modern extension), where some come with four posters.

Doubles from £249 (01590 624467; careysmanor.com)

For: Hampton Manor, Warwickshire

Instead of: Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Oxfordshire

Le Manoir fizzes with big occasion energy: a wedding anniversary ending in a zero in the corner; a special birthday overlooking the gardens. It’s also exceedingly expensive (doubles from £955). So if your budget for a milestone-marking foodie escape isn’t well into four figures, head up the M40 to Hampton Manor. Here owners James and Fjona Hill have slowly been crafting a thoughtful epicurean hub in the West Midlands countryside.

At restaurant Smoke, headed up by Masterchef: The Professionals winner Stuart Deeley, you’ll find hearty plates of meat cooked over coals, while baker Min Go rustles up plump cinnamon buns and loaves of sourdough. In 2022 they added Grace & Savour to the walled garden – with five of its own tactile suites attached – which swiftly won its first Michelin star in 2023. Le Manoir may have two, but Grace & Savour’s head chef David Taylor was part of the team that helped Maaemo in Oslo to its third, so he’s definitely one to watch.

The beautiful 15-course evening tasting menu is £165 (to Le Manoir’s £245) and might include Jerusalem artichokes with bay leaf and apple or rhubarb and toasted-hay custard, all drawn from organic, biodynamic and regeneratively farmed produce. A sensational destination restaurant in its own right.

Doubles from £180 (01675 446080; hamptonmanor.com)

The Rectory, Wiltshire

Swap: Thyme, Gloucestershire

It might seem like pretty, honey-stoned manor house hotels are ten-a-penny in the Cotswolds, but most of them cost a pretty penny too. That’s why the Rectory feels like such a special secret. Built originally for the rector of neighbouring All Saints’ Church and his 14 children, today the 15 bedrooms in the main house (there are three more in an adjoining cottage, which can also be taken exclusively) are divinely done out in muted tones, with deep beds and in some cases claw-footed bathtubs for soaking in.

Unlike Thyme, there’s no spa here, but unwind instead in the heated outdoor pool (open May-October) with its own honesty bar for a drink between dips. Or wander the gardens that wrap around around a serene pond dotted with lily pads. In the kitchen, chef Jake Simpson has arrived from London favourite Bocca di Lupo, giving a European accent to British ingredients on a menu that might include raw Hereford beef, lardo and bone marrow tartare or Cornish cod ink romesco with salted cod croquette. This is the answer to your affordable Cotswolds prays.

For: Exmoor Forest Inn, Somerset

Instead of: The Pig at Combe, Devon

Everyone goes wild for the Pigs, whose litter is now scattered from Kent to Cornwall, with new openings planned for Groombridge Place near Tunbridge Wells, a farm in Warwickshire and a takeover of Barnsley House in the Cotswolds. And while there are plenty looking to replicate the formula (rustic interiors meet locavore menus), the Exmoor Forest Inn – just over an hour’s drive northwest of the bucolic Pig at Combe in Devon’s Otter Valley – digs much deeper. The pub is part of the Exmoor Forest Estate, where the Greenwall brothers (Ed, Freddie and Alexander) raise native-breed, grass-fed beef and lamb, which stars on the menu in the dried hop-draped dining room.

Other ingredients are equally carefully sourced: sustainably caught fish from day boats landing in Appledore, Middle White pork from nearby Little Oak Farm, organic veg from Riverford. Its efforts haven’t gone unnoticed and the Exmoor Forest Inn was awarded a coveted Michelin Green Star in February. The 11 bedrooms have a layered look: velvet headboards, botanical fabrics and ditsy wallpaper. Outside, the brooding hills of the moor are cloaked in ferns and heather.

Doubles from £140 (01643 831341; exmoorforestinn.com)

Fritton Lake, Norfolk

Instead of: Soho Farmhouse, Oxfordshire

Soho Farmhouse went members-only back in December 2020, meaning that would-be-guests must be paid-up Soho House or Soho Friends members (a membership-lite option that gives discounts on stays, Soho Home and Cowshed products and in the group’s restaurants). Yet it’s still booked out, the restaurants jumping – and activities (from clay pigeon shooting to horse riding) and breakfast (whether from the mobile fry-up float or in the main barn) all come as extras.

In the middle of a 1,000-acre rewilding project over on the Norfolk-Suffolk border, Fritton Lake is another new-gen country club, with a smart Clubhouse in a former 16th-century manor, floating sauna and architectural cabins dotted through the trees. Booking a stay unlocks activities a-plenty, many of them included, such as paddleboard safaris on the two-mile-long lake, guided walks with foraging and nature experts, lawn and clay tennis courts and family volleyball and rounders sessions.

In the Clubhouse, bedrooms are country-house cosy, while the more minimalist, timber-clad cabins have glass walls for soaking up the nature that envelops them.

Doubles from £170 (01493 484008; frittonlake.co.uk)

For: The George and Dragon, Cumbria

Instead of: Askham Hall, Cumbria

The Lake District is no stranger to the Michelin Guide; the 2024 edition scattered 14 stars across the area. Askham Hall’s restaurant Allium, hunkered on the northeastern fringes of the Lakes, has one of those, lauded for its seasonal dishes driven by produce from the surrounding Lowther Estate. But the Lowther family don’t just do complicated canapés and prettily-plated tasting menus. They also have two more casual pubs with rooms (the Queen’s Head just down the road and the George and Dragon in nearby Clifton), whose kitchens are also supplied by the estate gardens.

The George and Dragon reopened in June 2023 after a fire forced a complete refurbishment. Now the 11 bedrooms – which range from a cosy single to a family room with bunk beds – are decorated in richly patterned wallpapers and fabrics, paired with antiques and art from the Lother family collection. Downstairs there’s Cumbrian Ales’s Loweswater Gold and Vanilla Oatmeal Stout on tap and a hearty menu that might include Askham saddleback pork and smoked bacon terrine and cuts of shorthorn beef with carrots and cabbage from the kitchen gardens.

Work it all off with stomps around the ruins of Lowther Castle and onwards around the Lowther Loop that connects to the more taxing 20-mile Ullswater Way.

Doubles from £240, including dinner and breakfast (01768 865381; georgeanddragonclifton.co.uk)

Foyers Lodge, Loch Ness

Instead of: The Fife Arms, Braemar

When it comes to Scottish country hotel interiors, there are two camps: the Scandi-Scots, all bleached wood and pebble palettes; and the Highland maximalists who are finally steering things away from tartan and hunting trophy tropes to print-on-print, antique-filled decadence. The moodily romantic Fife Arms in the Cairngorms is the poster child for this tribe, but keep going to Loch Ness, and Foyer’s Lodge is just as theatrical and beguiling.

When Anna Low was renovating this 19th-century former inn (with husband Philip), she toured auction houses across the Highlands, picking up huge Victorian dressers, marble washstands and gilt-framed portraits. She paired these against walls painted in shades picked from the surrounding landscape (inky blue, fir green, deep purple) or papered in William Morris prints and dotted with more contemporary Scottish artworks.

A taxidermy peacock sits atop an unusual square 1840s piano next to the wood-panelled bar, and white cast-iron tables and chairs in the garden call for gin and tonics overlooking the loch – it’s adults only, so cocktail hour can start whenever you like.

Doubles from £210 (01456 486351; foyerslodge.co.uk)

Cameron House, Loch Lomond

Instead of: Gleneagles, Perthshire

For another gallivanting Scottish estate at the gateway to the Highlands, look west to the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond. Cameron House’s baronial manor might have only been a hotel since 1990 – unlike Gleneagles, which celebrates its centenary this year – but it too has been given a good old spruce up in recent years, after a devastating fire in 2017.

Rooms now have a Highland fling in the roaring twenties vibe: lashings of velvet, oversized upholstered headboards and (in the most part mercifully subtle) tartan carpets. The Glen might have two Michelin stars for Restaurant Andrew Fairlie, but here it’s the loch views that dazzle at La Vista (fresh pasta; aperitivo cocktails). Meanwhile the Cameron Grill runs from Scottish breakfast (wash the haggis down with a little something from the Bloody Mary trolley) to West Coast lobster suppers.

Of course, there’s activities for days too, both on and off the loch: from golf to jet skiing, falconry to fishing, clay pigeon shooting to seaplane tours, as well as various pools and a substantial spa – meaning it all feels wildly further than just half an hour from Glasgow.

Doubles from £302 (01389 312210; cameronhouse.co.uk)

Sandy Mount House, Anglesey

Instead of: Penally Abbey, Tenby, Pembrokeshire

Just west of the pastel-pretty harbour town of Tenby, Penally Abbey is a glorious Gothic house that’s constantly tipped as Wales’ loveliest hotel. But if you’re looking to swerve Pembrokeshire’s most popular honeypot, head instead around the coast to the isle of Anglesey.

Here in the surf town of Rhosneigr, Sandy Mount House breezes in with its Hamptons beach house vibe. In the seven bedrooms, with names such as Shell, Driftwood and Dunes, a soothing blue, white and sandy palette is complemented with nautical touches: round porthole-like mirrors, wooden oars on the wall and upholstered window seats looking out to sea.

Downstairs, there’s potted cockles and black treacle sea trout in a dining room that opens out onto a heated terrace. Heed the call of the sea and head outside to the golden sands of Traeth Crigyll and dune-backed Traeth Llydan, perfect for rock-pooling and windsurfing. Or stomp inland to Llyn Maelog to listen for the calls of the reed warbler singing from the lake shore.

Doubles from £190 (01407 253102; sandymounthouse.co.uk)