Inns are generally establishments or buildings where travelers can seek lodging, and usually, food and drink. Inns are typically located in the country or along a highway. Before the advent of motorized transportation, they also provided accommodation for horses.
A pub is a drinking establishment licensed to serve alcoholic drinks for consumption on the premises. The term first appeared in the late 17th century, to differentiate private houses from those open to the public as alehouses, taverns and inns. Today, there is no strict definition, but CAMRA states a pub has four characteristics:
- is open to the public without membership or residency
- serves draught beer or cider without requiring food be consumed
- has at least one indoor area not laid out for meals
- allows drinks to be bought at a bar
A stagecoach is a four-wheeled public transport coach used to carry paying passengers and light packages on journeys long enough to need a change of horses. It is strongly sprung and generally drawn by four horses although some versions are drawn by six horses.
Eaton Socon is a community in the civil parish of St Neots, in the Huntingdonshire district, in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. Eaton Socon is a component of the town of St Neots, located on its south-west margin. Eaton Socon lies on the west side of the River Great Ouse, and is bounded on the west by the A1 road and on the south by the A428 road. On the north side Duloe Brook delineates the boundary with Eaton Ford, which is also part of St Neots.
Stony Stratford is a constituent town of Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England. Historically it was a market town on the important route from London to Chester. It is also the name of a civil parish with a town council in the City of Milton Keynes. It is in the north-west corner of the Milton Keynes urban area, bordering Northamptonshire and separated from it by the River Great Ouse.
The Tabard was an inn in Southwark established in 1307, which stood on the east side of Borough High Street, at the road's intersection with the ancient thoroughfare to Canterbury and Dover. It was built for the Abbot of Hyde in Winchester, who purchased the land to construct a place for himself and his ecclesiastical brethren to stay when on business in London.
The Angel, Islington, is a historic landmark and a series of buildings that have stood on the corner of Islington High Street and Pentonville Road in Islington, London, England. The land originally belonged to the Clerkenwell Priory and has had various properties built on it since the 16th century. An inn on the site was called the "Angel Inn" by 1614, and the crossing became generally known as "the Angel". The site was bisected by the New Road, which opened in 1756, and properties on the site have been rebuilt several times up to the 20th century. The corner site gave its name to Angel tube station, opened in 1901, and the surrounding Angel area of London.
Pub names are used to identify and differentiate traditional drinking establishments. Many pubs are centuries old, and were named at a time when most of their customers were illiterate, but could recognise pub signs. The use of signage was not confined to drinking establishments. British pubs may be named after and depict anything from everyday objects, to sovereigns, aristocrats and landowners. Other names come from historic events, livery companies, occupations, sports, and craftsmen's guilds. One of the most common pub names is the Red Lion. This list contains both modern and historical examples.
"Cock and bull story" is an English-language idiom for a far-fetched and fanciful story or tale of highly dubious validity. It is often used to describe a description of events told by someone who is being deceitful or giving an excuse, perhaps unconvincingly. The first recorded use of the phrase in English was in John Day's 1608 play Law-trickes or Who Would Have Thought It:
What a tale of a cock and a bull he told my father.
The Great North Road was the main highway between England and Scotland from medieval times until the 20th century. It became a coaching route used by mail coaches travelling between London, York and Edinburgh. The modern A1 mainly parallels the route of the Great North Road. Coaching inns, many of which survive, were staging posts providing accommodation, stabling for horses and replacement mounts. Nowadays virtually no surviving coaching inns can be seen while driving on the A1, because the modern route bypasses the towns in which the inns are found.
The Bear is a pub in Oxford, England, that was founded in 1774 as The Jolly Trooper. It stands on the corner of Alfred Street and Blue Boar Street, opposite Bear Lane in the centre of Oxford, just north of Christ Church, on the site of St Edward's churchyard. It was converted from the early 17th century residence of the stableman (ostler) for the coaching inn, The Bear Inn, which was on the High Street, Oxford. When The Bear Inn was converted into private housing in 1801, The Jolly Trooper changed its name to The Bear. There is a claim that by adopting its name, the current (1774) Bear Inn has acquired the history of the pub on the High Street, and so is one of the oldest pubs in Oxford. In 1952 the then landlord, Alan Course, started a collection of tie ends; a selection of the over 4,500 ties are on display around the pub. The tie collection was used as part of the plot of Colin Dexter's novel Death Is Now My Neighbour, in which Inspector Morse consults the landlord in order to identify a club tie. The building was Class II listed in January 1954.
A coach is a large, closed, four-wheeled, passenger-carrying vehicle or carriage usually drawn by two or more horses controlled by a coachman, a postilion, or both. A coach has doors in its sides and a front and a back seat inside. The driver has a raised seat in front of the carriage to allow better vision. It is often called a box, box seat, or coach box. There are many of types of coaches depending on the vehicle's purpose.
The King's Head Hotel is a hotel standing opposite the Shire Hall in Glyndŵr Street, Agincourt Square, Monmouth, Wales. It dates from the mid-17th century, and as one of the major inns in Monmouth was reputedly visited by Charles I of England in 1645. It has a fine black-and-white painted stone façade and became an important posting inn in the late 17th century, with a yard through an archway where visitors' horses could be stabled and where regular coach services called. In the 18th and 19th centuries, stagecoaches for London left from the inn. The range of buildings along Agincourt Street now includes the former Monmouth Bank and the County Club, while the inn itself is now part of the J D Wetherspoon pub chain. It is one of 24 buildings on the town's Heritage Trail and is a Grade II* listed building.
A stage station or relay station, also known as a staging post, a posting station, or a stage stop, is a facility along a main road or trade route where a traveller can rest and/or replace exhausted working animals for fresh ones, since long journeys are much faster with fewer delays when using well fed and rested mounts. Stage is the space between the places known as stations or stops — also known in British English as posts or relays.
The Old White Horse Cellar at No. 155 Piccadilly was one of the best-known coaching inns in England during the 18th and 19th centuries. The first mention of the White Horse Cellar is in 1720. It was originally located on the corner of Arlington Street, where the Ritz Hotel is now located. The first landlord, a man named Williams, named it in honor of the newly established House of Hanover, whose heraldic emblem featured a white horse. The White Horse rose to prominence under Abraham Hatchett who later moved it to the opposite side of the road on the corner of Albemarle Street, where it was known as "Hatchett’s Hotel and White Horse Cellar". The precise date of the move is not known, but was precipitated by the construction of the Bath Hotel, which was located on the corner of Piccadilly and Arlington as early as 1798. It was torn down in 1884 to make room for the Albemarle.
The Swan with Two Necks was a coaching inn in the City of London that, until the arrival of the railways, was one of the principal departure points for travel to the north of England from London. Its site was given over in the early 1860s to a goods and parcels depot for a firm of railway agents and carriers.
The Bull and Mouth Inn was a coaching inn in the City of London that dated from before the Great Fire of London in 1666. It was located between Bull and Mouth Street in the north and Angel Street in the south. It was once an important arrival and departure point for coaches from all over Britain, but particularly for the north of England and Scotland. It became the Queen's Hotel in 1830 but was demolished in 1887 or 1888 when new post office buildings were built in St Martin's Le Grand.
A post house, posthouse, or posting house was a house or inn where horses were kept and could be rented or changed out. Postriders could also be hired to take travellers by carriage or coach and delivered mail and packages on a route, meeting up at various places according to a schedule. Routes included post roads. A postmaster was an individual from whom horses and/or riders known as postilions or "post-boys" who might help a coachman drive coaches could be hired. A postilion might also travel on a coach to take back his employer's horses. The postmaster would reside in the post house.
The Dog & Bull is a public house in Croydon, England. It is a Grade II listed, 18th-century building with a 19th-century frontage in Surrey Street, on the site of a previous 12th- or 13th-century inn called The Bell.
