Photo above: Three Crowns. Horsefair Street, the Rifle Volunteer seen next door.
One of the major Leicester coaching Inns, built circa 1720. The name commemorated the union of the crown of Hanover (George I) with England and Scotland in 1714.
The last coach leaving the Three Crowns, 1868. A year later the inn was demolished with a new bank, the National Provincial, now a Nat West is built on the site. (The two pillars holding the portico purported to have been two of the original four from the High Cross ?)
Many banquets and feasts were held here for the ‘great and good’ of Leicester. The mayor would entertain dignitaries who visited Leicester.
One landlord of the Three Crowns was William Bishop: Bishop Street is named after him. A future Mayor of Leicester, William followed his father, James who was possibly the first landlord. William’s son, Willoughby, succeeded. Described as a ‘beau’ and single, he was the last of the Bishop family to be ‘mine host.’
A local newspaper lamented the demolition of the Three Crowns:
‘Throughout the reigns of George I, II, III, IV and William IV, the Three Crowns was associated with memories of its proprietors. Long before the scream of the locomotive had been herd in the valley of the Soar, before even a coach ran to and from the metropolis, the old inn was a halting place for the stranger. When the stage coach began its journey the Three Crowns was in the ascendant.
But when the Midland railway opened, the coaches one by one disappeared, the bustle of the inn yard, changing of horses, groups of idlers gathering around the coaches, became pictures of the past.
The old landlords pined away, and old ostlers groaned in corners as the glory of the inn departed.
Architecturally, the inn with its early Georgian staircase, half panelled rooms, its rear assembly room supported by the old pillars of the High Cross will be no more.
In a few years the Three Crowns will be known by tradition only, a building which had filled a place in the minds eye of successive generations will no longer be remembered, except in a dream or faded picture, and another generation will know it no more.’
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