Photo above: Work outside the Great Northern, building the Belgrave Road culvert.
On the 18th of December 1813, Samuel Day of Thurmaston sold a strip of land containing 2,369 square yards to a carpenter and joiner by the name of Robert Keightley for £324. The land was bounded on the east by the turnpike road leading from Leicester to Loughborough and on the north by a road 10 feet wide to be called the Canal Street.
By July of the following year, a mortgage document indicates that a messuage had been erected on some part of the land and on the 21st of July 1820, the majority of the land which now included ( as well as the messuage), a yard, workshops, warehouses and gardens which was purchased for £1,151 by James Jackson, a farmer and malster of Great Wigston. Canal Street had by this time been renamed Wood Street.
It is not clear as to exactly when the messuage was made into a pub, but the 1843 directory is the first to mention the New Inn. In 1862, ownership was passed to a John Garner, and the by property this time included a malt office and kiln which had been converted from workshops by the previous owner.
The pub was purchased in 1867 by George Harrison and it was he who arranged for the pub to be rebuilt between then and the 12th of May 1882 when it was bought for £4,500 by Alfred Jesson, whose secondary occupation was a wheelwright, although the pub was still called the New Inn on the last change of ownership, it was renamed The Great Northern Hotel probably in 1883, around the time of the opening of the New Great Northern Railway Station which stood right opposite.
Licensees: 1855 J Hancock; 1864, J Garner; 1868, Thomas Nichols; then William Morris; 1878, Charles Newton. Newton was charged the next year with permitting drunkenness, over 30 men also charged.
1882, Alf Jesson; 1888, Edward Mason; 1889, William Peck; 1890, Thomas Wright; 1894, Nathaniel Mawby; 1905, Jeffery Wilkinson; 1908, Henry Chamberlain; 1919, George Dexter; 1921, Robert Hackett; 1926, William Church; 1935, Horace Henshaw, and 1939, Phillip Lumb.
On the 16th of July 1888, the property was professionally valued by Roderick & Sons, auctioneers of Birmingham. They valued the pub at £9,000. The same auctioneers and also valued the Eclipse on Eastgate for the same figure. On the 12th of December 1888, the pub was purchased by the Beeston Brewery Company Limited for £10,000. See layout below.
Interestingly, and earlier 1870s plan of the New Inn shows that the original bar and a living room made way for the new enlarged bar. The original parlour and the adjoining shop were knocked into to become the smoke room and the old main kitchen became the sit of the new bar parlour. This meant that far more space was allocated to the public after the altercations.
In 1894, Wood street was renamed Woodhouse street to avoid confusion with another Wood street off Royal East street.
The pub was reputed to have the longest bar in the city, being 52 feet long, with 12 hand pumps, it continued to sell its Shipstones beers and was striving right up to the end of the 1950s, several years after the closure of the Great Northern Railway. However, when it was decided to realign Abbey Park road and build a new roundabout on Belgrave Gate to assist with the traffic flow, many buildings needed to be demolished and the pub was finally sold to the council for £27,000 on 31st of March 1971.
Curiously enough, two other Bass pubs called The Great Northern Inn, one a few hundred yards away, on the corner of Cranbourne street and Allington street, the other a couple of miles away, at the corner of Victoria road east and Hasting road, were also both sold to the council in this era, on the 29th of March 1971 (just two days previously) and 13th of March 1970 respectively.
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