The Great George

Seventeen Heritage Buildings on One Charlottetown Street

Great George Street is the axis of old Charlottetown, running from Province House at the top down to the harbour, and it is lined with the brick and clapboard of a nineteenth-century colonial capital. The Great George is not one building on that street but seventeen of them, restored and knitted into a single hotel that takes up close to a whole block at number 58. Mike Cassidy and Kevin Murphy started buying the houses in 1990 and reopened the assembled property in 1996, in what remains one of the largest private heritage projects the island has seen.

Why It Works

A heritage hotel usually means one restored house and a lot of framed photographs. Here the restoration is at the scale of a streetscape, which changes the experience: you cross a courtyard or a stretch of pavement between the lobby and your room, and the walk is through the same townscape the Fathers of Confederation knew. We kept it because that scale is genuinely rare in Canada, and because breakfast, parking and a weeknight reception are built into the rate rather than added to it.

Why This Location

Province House, where the 1864 conference met, stands at the head of the street, with the Confederation Centre of the Arts beside it and the summer theatre season inside. St Dunstan’s Basilica faces the hotel directly, its twin spires visible from most of the upper rooms. Walk the other way and Great George Street ends at Peake’s Wharf and the waterfront boardwalk, where the harbour tours and the seafood shacks are. Victoria Row and the restaurant blocks are a couple of minutes away, and the whole of downtown is walkable in a quarter of an hour.

Fast Facts

• Price: Premium to Luxury

• Vibe: Colonial, collegiate, island-warm

• Rooms: classic rooms, deluxe rooms, one-bedroom suites and full townhouses spread across seventeen restored buildings

• Best For: history travellers, families needing a townhouse, couples on an island loop, theatre visitors

• Our Favorite Thing About the Hotel: sleeping in the building that was The Pavilion, where the delegates to the Charlottetown Conference stayed

• Dining: breakfast included each morning and an evening guest reception on weeknights, with the owners’ restaurants and the Victoria Row kitchens a short walk away

• Amenities: free on-site parking, fitness room, concierge, walking tours of the historic district

• Attractions: Province House at the top of the street, Confederation Centre of the Arts beside it, St Dunstan’s Basilica opposite the hotel, Peake’s Wharf and the boardwalk at the bottom

From The London House to The Pavilion

The oldest part of the hotel dates to 1846, when James H. Down put up the building that the merchant Henry Haszard would run as The London House, selling parasols, corsets, tea caddies and nails to the colony. Haszard converted it into a hotel called The Pavilion in 1857, and it was in that capacity that it housed delegates to the conference on union seven years later. The building spent the twentieth century as The Regent before the current owners took it on, and that layered history is legible in the fabric rather than only on the walls.

Classic Rooms, Suites and Whole Townhouses

The spread of accommodation is wider than a single-building hotel could offer. Classic and deluxe rooms cover the straightforward stay, one-bedroom suites suit longer visits, and the townhouses give a family or a group their own front door and stairs, which on an island trip with children is worth more than any amenity list. Ask which building you are in when you book: the character shifts noticeably from one house to the next, and the basilica view is not distributed evenly.

Breakfast, the Reception and What to Know Before You Book

Breakfast is included and taken in the main house, and on weeknights there is a guest reception in the early evening, which in a hotel of this shape does useful work in pulling people out of seventeen separate buildings into one room. Parking is free on site, a rarity downtown. Check-in is from three in the afternoon and check-out at eleven. Charlottetown fills through the summer festival season, so book early if the trip falls between June and September.