Notorious past of city pub still serving locals after 171 years
ALMOST 200 years ago there was a small corner of Cardiff full of brothels, pubs and shady characters.
Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane were both known as “dens of infamy, shoeless feet, broken heads and flat noses”, where “every stone of the pavement had been stained at one point with human blood”.
The two streets were deemed so bad that they were erased from the map altogether in the late 1800s.
If you go to the same spot in the capital now, you’re surrounded by huge gleaming towers as the ever-growing traffic trundles through the city.
Although completely unrecognisable from the 19th century, the Golden Cross pub is all that remains from those years.
Dozens of pubs from the two streets are now consigned to history, but people have been drinking beer on the site since at least 1846 – 171 years.
The pub has been called the Golden Cross since 1860 and was later rebuilt in 1904, according to Anthony Rhys who has been researching and writing a book about the people of Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane.
Technically The Golden Cross was on Bute Street, but it is often referred to as part of Whitmore Lane.
The longer half of its frontage was along Whitmore Lane and the front door was on the corner of Whitmore Lane and Bute Street.
The history begins in November 1846 with a pub called The Shield and Newcastle, run by John Platt and his wife Ann.
Records found by artist Anthony Rhys, from Beddau in Rhondda Cynon Taff, found Ann had a run-in with a known prostitute.
In June 1847 a drunk Rachel Holiday, who was going out with a criminal from Cornwall, started to smash glasses in the pub before hitting Ann over the head with a jug.
A month later John was assaulted by another woman, Kesiah Jones, who came out of jail, went to his pub and ended up smashing five window panes.
In September 1847 a milkman parked his cart too close to the windows of the Shields.
Ann went out first to try to tip his milk cart over, the milkman shoved her back causing John to get involved.
During the fracas the milkman’s donkey ran off up the street.
On Boxing Day 1847, which was also a Sunday, John Platt was in trouble for being open as a mixture of soldiers, locals and “girls of the town” including “Plymouth Eliza” and Ann Perkins (who went on to run a brothel) were drinking in the Shields.
After Ann Platt died in 1849 the pub passed to Daniel Francis.
In 1852 Daniel had dropped The Shields part of the name and the pub was called New Castle Tavern. This name further evolved into the Castle Inn by 1855.
It seems to have been a quiet place, supplying spirits to Whitmore Lane and staying out of trouble, until a man almost burned to death there in 1856.
Newspaper reports said that after Daniel smelt smoke, a policeman found a lodger “comfortably asleep” in the front room “while the bed clothes were burning all around him”.
It said: “He had fallen asleep while smoking his pipe, and the burning tobacco had set fire to the bed-clothes.
“The constable extinguished the fire without any great difficulty – a few minutes more, and probably the lodger would have paid for his indulgence with his life.”
The Golden Cross was born by