(Disclaimer: Joking aside, I fully understand the risks/dangers involved in these adventures and do so in the full knowledge of what could happen. I don't encourage or condone and I accept no responsibility for anyone else following in my footsteps. Under UK law, trespass without force is a civil offence. I never break into a place, I never photograph a place that is currently occupied, as this would be morally wrong and intrusive, I never take any items and I never cause any damage, as such no criminal offences have been committed in the making of this blog. I will not disclose location. I leave the building as I find it and only enter to take photographs for my own pleasure and to document the building.
If you've been reading my blogs for a while now, you'll know that I've been to quite a few abandoned pubs. Nowadays if I post photos of an abandoned pub online, someone always finds a way to talk about lockdown, which is largely because pub culture was already in a state of decline and our series of lockdowns has probably killed off quite a few more too. It's too early to tell where I will or won't be drinking when all this bullshit is over, but I won't be featuring any lockdown closures on this blog. This particular pub closed long before lockdown, and put down your pitchforks because I visited it before lockdown too!
What drew me to this pub was a solitary urbex post by some guy. He referred to it by a nickname, rather than its actual name, and this seems to have helped it stay off the mainstream radar... but not mine.
Slipping inside, we found that the pub was in quite the state of disrepair, but the decay was mostly natural. Having escaped widespread attention, it's not been heavily vandalised. Much of the tables and chairs have been removed, leaving it pretty spacious, with a ceiling that looks like it'll come crashing down at any moment.
The pub was built in 1835, and appears on Victorian maps as a public house. Given that it has a large barn, I think it might even have been a coaching inn. That is, it served the needs of travelers and their horses. Obviously, as horses stopped being everyones primary form of transport, coaching inns ultimately just became regular pubs. In this case, the barn became a function area.
This pub also allegedly served food too, but it would not surprise me if this was also a more recent change, brought about by the decline in the pub industry in the late 20th and early 21st Century. However, the reviews I've found on this place were mixed, so say the least. A
review from 2006 was particularly brutal, calling the food tasteless, poorly prepared and
overpriced, before ending with the rather ominous phrase "You have been warned."
This review was so
bad that it actually lured people in to see if the pub could possibly be as
horrific as they say, and then reviews from 2008 went along the lines of "I
came here because of the bad review, and had a great time, so thanks." I guess there's no such thing as bad publicity.
The blackboard on the wall still displays the menu, which seems bizarre. This place has been closed for almost a decade, and this has survived being defaced.
To the left of the blackboard is a doorway to the best part of any abandoned building, the toilets.
These toilets are perhaps the most notorious part of the whole building. In 2010, a car actually came crashing through the wall. According to the local papers, someone had actually just left the toilets when it happened. Had he been pissing a little longer, things could have been pretty ugly. As it was, the worst injury anyone had was a fractured wrist, although various media articles can't seem to make their mind up on who actually suffered it. Some say it was the young male driver, who the landlady said was actually quite nice and apologetic, while others say it was one of the four female passengers. And because this is the mainstream media we're talking about, this isn't the only inconsistency to the story. The simple tale of a car crashing through a pub wall is too complicated for the average journalist.
Fractured wrists aside, another inconsistency is that they specify that it happened to the male toilets. But photos of the car crash show it poking out of the wall corresponding with these toilets, which are the ladies. Did the pub swap the toilets around after the crash? I guess that's possible. A guy could have died here, and in the interests of gender equality, it's important to endanger the females next!
Finally, the papers say that the landlady herself and her bar full of twenty or so other people all heard a bang when it happened. This might be true. The only conflicting information comes from a gentleman who approached us when we were taking our external shots. My initial explanation for what we were doing was one of honesty. I told him quite bluntly that we were urban explorers, but he had no idea what that meant, so I pulled a lie out of my ass and explained that Jess was meine schwester and we were simply checking out the old drinking hole of our deceased parents. Jess is quite good at accidentally looking forlorn, and dead parents win over the critics every time. Just look at Bambi. It's a family favourite but when you really think about it, the story is pretty shite. All it really has going for it is a skunk that has a sex change. That's pretty progressive for 1942, but nevertheless, there's not really much plot.
But I digress.
The man told us of the car crash but according to him, everyone in the pub had been completely oblivious. He'd actually seen the crash from the village, and had gone into the pub to tell them.
It does seem unlikely that nobody in the pub would notice a car crashing through the wall though. But it seems equally unlikely that the mainstream media would get something right. This is one hell of a conundrum, like a Star Wars stormtrooper opening fire on a Star Trek redshirt.
The toilets are still in better condition than the toilets in some active pubs and clubs, or at least, the ones that would be active if it wasn't for lockdown.
The TV is still here, and probably still works.
There's also quite a lot of pictures dotted around the place. Some are on the wall, and some are on the floor. This one I clearly rotated slightly for the sake of the picture, and to show how different the floor is underneath it. It's sat here undisturbed for quite a while, likely just dropped and forgotten when all the tables and chairs were cleared out.
Behind the bar, it says "A day without wine is a day without sunshine."
Also behind the bar is this sign asking people not to swear. The request is also repeated in Welsh, which I've recently started learning on Duolingo alongside Russian and German. I find this actually kinda hilarious because the second line "Os gwelwch yn dda" literally just means "Please." It took an entire line just to say something that's one syllable in English. Stuff like this is why I love languages.
There's not much else left behind the bar. Often in abandoned pubs there will be glasses and the occasional bottle.
One of my pet peeves is roman numeral clocks getting the number four wrong. It's IV, not IIII.
There's still a menu behind the bar.
And here's a list of all the things the bar staff had to do at the end of the night.
There's this picture frame hanging up in one of the entrances, which would have once held loads of old photos and memories. Thankfully these have been saved. The frame is barely hanging on to the wall though, and it's been smashed quite bit, but I'm unsure if this is vandalism. It's in a very narrow hallway towards an exit, so it might have just been bumped when all the furniture was getting cleared out.
I just think if someone came down here to deliberately smash stuff, they would have done a bit more.
This blackboard invites people to check out the Facebook page. We did so, and found one solitary update from 2012 inviting people to come to the quiz and bingo night. Nobody had responded.
There's some pretty gruesome mold up there. I think at this stage, reopeniing would cost a bomb just to make the building safe.
At the back, far away from where the car hit, are the gents toilets. I kinda like that the gents toilet symbol has him lying on the floor, clutching his crotch in desperation. Or maybe he's lying down because he was hit by a car...
In typical mainstream media fashion, the date of closure for this pub is often said to be 2010, on the date that the car crashed through into the toilets. However, the pub actually closed in 2012. Even the presence of the car didn't stop them. They had to keep it there for a few days, because it turned out it was actually holding the building up, and the papers say that the gents just had to make do with the ladies toilets, in spite of the fact we've established it was the ladies that got smashed.
The blame for the pubs closure typically falls on the construction of a bypass, which passed right by the pub, somewhat rendering the road next to this pub rather redundant, and stopping traffic from passing it on their way from A to B. But those in the know, including the chap who spoke to us outside, have said that the owner sold the pub because he was old, rather than because of a lack of trade. He apparently sold the pub for a lot less than what it was worth, with the understanding that it would remain a pub. He made a bit of a booboo though, because the new owner wanted to develop houses here. It all sounds a little underhanded, but it's important to note that all of this is gossip, and not a confirmed fact.
As you can probably tell by the sudden change in lighting, the kitchen has no ceiling.
There's still some old kitchen hygiene notices stuck to the walls.
But one of the most grimmest discoveries was at the foot of the fridge freezer. What is that?
Oh it's just a tub of butter that's been emptied on the floor and now has stuff growing on it. Yum.
It sure is annoying that this person didn't include the area code on that phone number. Back to the wanking sock for me...
Wait, why is the letter box on the door between the kitchen and the stairs?
The upstairs portion was incredibly dodgy to walk on. The floor sagged under our footsteps, and in some of the rooms, it was even more precarious. We stuck to the edges as we made out way around.
All of the furniture is long gone, leaving the upper floors pretty barren and empty.
Hey look, there's some penis graffiti. I guess an adventure around a derelict building just wouldn't be the same without it.
The bathrooms alright.
There's also a small kitchen.
So, the future of this pub seems pretty bleak. I've seen documents from 2014 outlining plans for five houses to be built here. But the local council rejected the planning application, saying that building houses here would cause harm to the
green barrier land... although it has to be said, the land they want to
build on is hardly green. It mostly consists of the pub, the pubs car park, the beer garden, and the pubs barn. It's a bit of a lame excuse, and quite a few of the locals have pointed this out.
As of 2019, the councils refusal has been appealed and refused again, so it looks like the pub is just going to sit here and rot. Some locals have mentioned that they suspect
corruption and ulterior motives from the council, but I don't know what
they'd have to gain from keeping a big derelict pub rotting away on
their precious tarmacked green barrier land. I think
rather than have a sinister agenda, we should give this council the benefit of the doubt and consider that maybe they're just a bunch of incompetent boobs.
That's it for the main pub. It's time to check out the barn!
Pretty much anyone can get in here, and it still has a nice friendly entrance sign above the doorway. Back in the day, this was the function area. Reviews from 2006 call it the Hyde-Out bar, but from what I've heard it also used to host the local folk club, and in the 1970s, it would hold rock nights.
Nowadays, it just hosts satanic rituals.
Seriously, what's been going on here?
Some people have also signed the ceiling beam. Maybe it's the folks behind the admittedly impressive pentagram, or maybe not. Ellen, Ruby, Ffion, Max and Emily. Waitaminute... One guy and four girls, just like in the car back in 2010! What, is it the same kids trying to conjure up the ghost of their dead hatchback? It's gone, mate. Move on.
The pentagram is only on the barns upper floor, but to get to the lower floor, we had to go down the stairs outside.
There is a pretty nice vintage water pump here. It was likely used back when the pub was a coaching inn, assuming I was right about that.
In the lower barn were the pubs old signs, advertising good food and fine wine. It's unfortunate, but since my visit here, I've seen several of these signs for sale online. I'm not sure whether they had legitimate permission or if they were stolen due to the door is wide open. I probably shouldn't get involved. I do know that locals have been in into the pub very recently, but they seem more interested in making sure nobody is squatting there.
Sadly, as is often the case in these weird stand-offs between developers and getting planing permission, it seems that the building is just going to slowly rot away until nothing can be done with it. I think even now the cost of reopening it as a pub and making it safe would be quite enormous, and that's just not what the owners want to do. But what the owners want to do isn't what the council want, so they seem to be just letting it decline until nature demolishes it.
It's quite sad. I personally would love to see it reopened as a pub again, but if that's not possible then surely houses are better for the locality than a big derelict health and safety hazard, but what do I know?
That's all I've got for this place. Jess wasn't much of a fan, but I loved it. My next blog will be about a pet cemetery, and then I'm going to write about a big underground thing under some village. In the meantime, I'm on quite a few social media algorithmic hellscapes, and you can follow me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter... you know, the big three that everyone loathes but nobody leaves. You can also follow me on Vero, which is like Instagram but without the algorithm, and also without the userbase. And follow me on Reddit too, for whenever I remember that I'm on reddit.
Thanks for reading!
Fantastic. Thanks for sharing this beautiful building and the story behind it 💖
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