Trumpington Local History Group: Trumpington Public Houses

Trumpington Village Sign unveiled June 2010, designed by Sheila Betts.

Trumpington Local History Group

Trumpington Public Houses

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Peter Dawson
March 2009 and later updates

This history of Trumpington public houses is based on a presentation given at the meeting titled Along the High Street, 26 March 2009.

There have been nine public houses or inns in Trumpington over the last 500 years. Five of these pubs remain in use as pubs or restaurants:
     The Green Man
     The Coach & Horses (now the Wok ‘n’ Grill)
     The Tally Ho
     The Volunteer (now Bollywood Spice)
     The Unicorn (renamed The Lord Byron Inn, May 2012)
while four of the pubs no longer exist:
     The Red Lion
     The Black Swan
     The Ram’s Head
     The White Lion

There is evidence of the Ram’s Head, the White Lion and the Black Swan in the 16th-18th centuries, but they appear to have closed before the late 18th century.

The only inns recorded in the 1790s were the Green Man and the Coach & Horses, opposite each other on the High Street.

By the 1840s, the Red Lion and the Tally Ho had also opened, a short distance to the south along the High Street. The Red Lion was rebuilt in the 1930s and eventually closed in the 1970s.

The Unicorn opened in Church Lane in the 1850s and the Volunteer on Trumpington Road also in the 1850s.

Three of the pubs have been converted into restaurants in recent years: the Coach & Horses, the Green Man and the Volunteer.

Extract from the Inland Revenue Land Value map for Trumpington, 1910-11, showing the Green Man, the Coach & Horses, the Red Lion, the Tally Ho and the Unicorn. Reproduced by permission of Cambridgeshire Archives, file 470/047, sheet XLVII.10.

Sources

The Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (1959) describes the Green Man and the Coach & Horses, p. 390-91.
The Victoria County History (VCH) (1982) includes a summary of the different pubs, p. 250-51.

See the bibliography for full details.