Skindles
former hotel in Taplow, Buckinghamshire, England, United Kingdom
Skindles was a hotel in Maidenhead, England, on the Buckinghamshire bank of the River Thames by Maidenhead Bridge. Formerly the Orkney Arms, built in 1743, it was turned from a coaching inn into a fashionable hotel by William Skindle in 1833. In the 20th century, it became notorious as a place for adulterous assignations. Its guests included Winston Churchill and Princess Margaret. Musicians who performed there included The Stranglers, The Rolling Stones, and The Strawbs. The hotel appears in the film Kind Hearts and Coronets. Skindles is mentioned in the play Journey's End by R. C. Sherriff: 'We danced a bit at Skindles, and drank a lot of port and muck'.
A property developer bought the site in 2006 for just over £30m, but Irish Nationwide bank took it over in 2009 to try to recover a £40m loan. The property was then transferred to the Irish bank NAMA. Barratt Homes and the National Grid then secured an option for most of the site for a joint development project involving housing and a hotel. South Bucks council adopted a residential-led development brief in July 2013 but argued that it would prefer Skindles Hotel itself to be renovated; any demolition proposals would need to be "robustly justified".
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q13529007. Authority coordinates are 51.525, -0.701. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1743, 1833, 2006 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Skindles” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.