Time Gentlemen Please!

Berkhamsted and surrounding villages are blessed with plenty of watering holes, but back in the annals of history there were even more inns…

If you did a pub crawl around Berkhamsted now, you’d have imbibed more pints than most of us could handle, but Berkhamsted has seen many more licensed premises over the years that are no longer in operation.

According to historians, The Swan’s location on the junction between the old Roman Road Akeman Street (High Street) and the main route between Berkhamsted and Windsor Castle (Chesham Road) suggests it could have been one of the town’s earliest inns.

During the 18th century most inns and ale houses brewed their own beer, and the Swan’s brewhouse was at the back, on what was known as Grubbs Lane.

John Edward Lane senior (1808 –1889) is well known in the town’s history. He was a horticulturalist who built up the family business, John Lane Nurseries (where Wood’s Garden Centre is on the High Street). The company name was recognised across the country, and was well known for its awardwinning roses, fruit trees, shrubs, and bedding plants. The Nurseries even bred a special apple variety – the Lane’s Prince Albert apple – to mark the 1841 visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to Berkhamsted.

John Edward Lane was quite an entrepreneur, and he also had a side hustle in brewing beer, He bought a number of inns in Berkhamsted, including The Swan.

You can find John’s gravestone in Rectory Lane Cemetery.

In more recent history, the Swan became one of the town’s principal hotels, but closed in the 1980s, and is now home to the Swan Youth Project charity, which supports local young people.

The Boote Inn was at 37 Castle Street. In 1871, Mary Margrave was listed as licensee. Her stepchildren had a rather sad history. One of them, John Margrave, is also buried in Rectory Lane Cemetery. There were seven children, and their father George was a shoemaker and a beer retailer.

Their mother (also called Mary Ann) died in 1841, when John was only 10. His younger sister Ann died the same year, and the children were distributed to relatives – John and his brother George to his paternal grandparents in the High Street, while 16-month-old Sarah went to her maternal grandparents in Northchurch. Joseph, 16, and Elizabeth, 14, and Thomas, five, stayed with their father.

In 1844, John’s father married again, to another Mary Ann, and they had five more children.

John continued as a shoemaker, got married and had seven children. He was declared bankrupt in 1869 and unsuccessfuly tried to follow his father into the licensed trade, by taking on the tenancy of The Swan in Dudswell, but was refused a licence.

The Boote closed after the First World War and became a bric a brac shop.

Like the Boote, so many closed-down pubs have second (and maybe third) lives in different incarnations. The ale house the Fox and Hounds sat next to Grooms the bakers, in Potten End. When it closed it became a transport cafe, called Fred’s Cafe.

Of course some buildings are no longer there. Take the White Hart, which sat next to the Town Hall and was built in 1861 to echo the style of its neighbour, designed by architect Edward Buckton Lamb, who has been described, as being in the ‘Rogue-Goth’ camp of architecture.

Two cottages owned by Berkhamsted School were demolished to make way for the inn, and it’s believed to be on the site of an even older inn – the medieval Saracen’s Head, which became the George during the reign of Henry VIII and was renamed the Prince’s Arms in 1806.

The Highfield road area was a good place to buy a drink – at the top was the Chaffcutter’s Arms, the drinking den of choice for local farm labourers. An interesting mix of bare-fist fighters and businessmen frequented the nearby Five Bells, and with circuses held behind it, surely there would have been some interesting clientele at the Red Lion too.

The Royal Oak was a small alehouse next to the Sayer almshouses, and when you tired of that you could cross the road to the Star and Garter.

As we’ve mentioned, Berkhamsted was on the main route to and from London, so coaching inns were plentiful and they had their fair share of noble visitors. The Red Lion offered accommodation and stables to weary travellers, but out of sight of its wealthy visitors was Red Lion Yard, which had a very different story. There were up to 18 little cottages behind the pub at one time, rented out as tenements to families. In 1886, the overcrowding of the homes had caught the attention of the sanitary authority, according to the Bucks Herald: ‘The Inspector reported several houses in Red Lion Yard, Berkhampstead, as being over-crowded, and orders were made in the cases of Thos. Belcher, George Kingston… and Emma Dolling to abate the overcrowding.’ Typhoid was reported in 1874, and by 1886, a Dr. Saunders stated that four houses there were ‘filthy and dilapidated, and quite unfit for human habitation’.

In 1889 the Red Lion pub was sold to Edwin East, who ran an antique shop until the building was demolished in 1939.

As late as 1911, there were still 15 cottages housing 77 people in Red Lion Yard.

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