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Lost pub · English Street

The White Horse Inn

Gone 1916

Gone
Joined to the Bush Hotel in 1891; closed by the scheme, October 1916
There now
In commercial use by 2018
Address
44 English Street
Where exactly
On English Street. The exact spot isn't known, so the pin marks the street, not the building.

Fronted on English Street, White Horse Lane and Blackfriars Street all at once, which tells you how these plots ran; one address for it is 2 White Horse Lane. It was trading by 1822, and Parson and White's directory of 1829 names Isabella Thompson as its keeper.

Hugh McGrath took it over in February 1855 from the Crown Inn on Corporation Road, advertising the White Horse as 'next door to the Bush Hotel', in a central situation near the Citadel station, with 'better accommodation for travellers'. That places it on English Street beside the Bush. In February 1856 a soda-water maker sued Mr M'Grah of the White Horse for unreturned bottles, along with the Spread Eagle and the Plume of Feathers, and lost all three cases.

The Post Office directory of 1858 lists 'White Horse, H. M'Grath, 44 English street' and, separately, 'Bush, W. A. King, Blackfriars street', the same two innkeepers as the 1861 census, which gives Hugh McGrath as from Ireland. Until 1891 the White Horse and the Bush Hotel's own tap on Blackfriars Street, the Bush Tap, were two separate houses.

McGrath had moved on to the Bay Horse by 1867, when C. Lattimer signed the innkeepers' memorial for the White Horse; Lattimer's licence was suspended for a fortnight in August 1868. It is in the directories as the White Horse up to 1884, when Bulmer's lists James Lidderdale at 2 White Horse Lane, Blackfriars Street. In March 1886 the licence of the White Horse Inn, Blackfriars Street, passed from John Reed to Nancy Reed; John Reed had gone to the Golden Fleece on Corporation Road the month before. A Hugh McGrath 'of the White Horse Inn, Blackfriars Street' was on the magistrates' black list in September 1889, convicted of selling drink to a drunken person, and his renewal was adjourned.

J. W. Watt rebuilt it in 1891. The Chief Constable's report that September records the Bush Hotel joined to the White Horse, giving the Bush three stock rooms, a billiard room and three bedrooms; the White Horse's ground floor was made a bar room, and the Bush Vaults were to be let as a shop, 'thus making one bar room less, and I hope the change will improve the character of the White Horse Inn'. From then on there was one bar. Kelly's directories list it as the Bush Hotel Vaults, Blackfriars Street, in 1897, 1906 and 1910, and as the White Horse again in 1914, under John Harman of the Bush Hotel. Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's houses has a single White Horse, on Blackfriars Street, closed in October 1916, which it found in commercial use in 2018.

Sources 16

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