White Horse HQ 🐴 🎶

This tiny pub is squeezed between Blackwell’s main shop and its newer small shop to the west. The building dates from the sixteenth century, although its stuccoed timber-framed fronting probably dates from the eighteenth. Its front was rebuilt in 1951, when a painted wall was revealed on the first floor.

 

It is a Grade II listed building. It belonged to the city from 1629 to 1773, and was then owned by Exeter College up until 1980, when it was taken over by the brewery which owns the pub.

 

It is one of Oxford’s oldest pubs, and according to the Encyclopaedia of Oxford Pubs has had many different names: it was called the Mermaid when the whitebaker Roger Scott was given a licence for it in 1591, and was later known as the White Mermaid, and then the Jolly Volunteer.

 

Then it took the name of the White Horse, but when the Elephant to its east closed down in 1820, it appears to have adopted that name for the next fifteen years.

 

By the late 1830s, however, the pub is listed categorically in directories as the White Horse.

 

This was originally a Hall’s pub, but was taken over by Mitchell’s & Butler in May 2006.

Done