Welcome return Historic boozer reopens for first time in two years
ONE of Bristol’s most historic pubs has reopened – more than two years after the last pint was pulled.
The Llandoger Trow, which has served ale and cider to pirates and paupers since 1664, reopened on Saturday after a major restoration.
One of the city’s last remaining timber-frame buildings, the pub on the corner of King Street and Queen Charlotte Street, near Welsh Back, closed in April 2019 after a chequered recent history as a Berni Inn during the 1960s, and most recently as a Brewers Fayre pub run by Whitbread.
With rumours of major repairs to the building being needed, it closed on April 20, 2019, and there were big fears in Bristol that it would never open again as a pub.
The historic building was on the market for a million pounds and was eventually bought last year by the Bloomsbury Leisure Group, which runs a number of pubs in London, as well as the Crofters Rights pub in Stokes Croft, and The Lanes bowling alley and venue in the city centre.
After months of being restored to its former glory, the first barrels arrived late last week, and the pub opened to punters at lunchtime on Saturday.
The pub already has its own Twitter account, with updates on the restoration and reopening posted last week, before a triumphant picture of the first pint pulled.
It’s a welcome return for what is a Bristol institution. The Llandoger Trow was Robert Louis Stevenson’s inspiration for the Admiral Benbow pub in Treasure Island, and reputed to be where Daniel Defoe met Alexander Selkirk, a man who spent four years castaway on a desert island in the Pacific - whose story gave him the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe.
A ‘trow’ is a flat-bottomed sailing barge that was designed to be able to get far up the River Wye and the River Severn, and they were built in a number of places but particularly in the Monmouthshire village of Llandogo, 20 miles up the River
Wye from the Severn Estuary.
The original landlord was reputed to be a Captain Hawkins, who came from Llandogo.
The large pub is reputed to have 15 different ghosts, and would have been packed with merchants, captains and sailors in Bristol’s heyday as a maritime centre, and in Victorian times it was where many of the performers and musicians appearing at the Theatre Royal across the road in King Street would have stayed.
Built when King Street was constructed in 1664, it was originally a row of three houses, but was almost totally destroyed in the Bristol Blitz, and was much bigger – only three of the five original projecting gables remain.