This is stage two of the virtual historic commute which saw me pass the doomed Dominoes on the boundary of Woodville and Hartshorne in this previous post. My almost daily journey would see me continue north along the A514 into Hartshorne proper. I'd pass the Bull's Head, round the bend and then take the minor road at the junction by the Admiral Rodney. It's still possible to get a pint and a bite at the Bull's Head and you can still have one whilst watching the village cricket team play on their ground behind the Rodney. Obviously neither of these two will feature as the subject of this post. That honour goes to the New Inn.
The New Inn is a new inn for me. I'd never even heard of it until I started researching into the bygone that was to be the subject of this post but which has now been demoted to a future Lost Pubs From a Lost Commute #3. I've also discovered that the New Inn isn't the only new inn to me in Hartshorne either, for whilst digging in the directories for mentions of what was, until its recent relegation, going to be the subject of this particular piece of drivel I came across reference to the Red Cow which continued to make appearances until the mid-1840s. For a while I wondered if it could've been this building with its ghost signage near the old mill pond, a little further along the main road, but it appears in all likelihood this was probably simply a former off licence. Where the Red Cow used to live remains a mystery to me.
Anyway, enough of this distraction. Let's get back to the commute and the New Inn. The journey saw me turning left to leave the A514 where it bent by the Admiral Rodney, to enter Repton Road.
If we were to travel back in time a hundred years or so the view would've looked like this.
It can be seen that the Admiral Rodney has been pretty much rebuilt, an event which took place in the late 1950s, and where its current western car park is used to stand the New Inn.
Quite when the New Inn popped up as a new inn I can't be certain. The earliest reference to it that I've so far come across is in the 1871 census when blacksmith Henry Pickering is recorded as also being a publican.
A decade earlier Henry is also shown living next door to the Rodney Inn but is described solely as a blacksmith and there is no mention of the New Inn so in all probability Worthington's opened the pub sometime in the 1860s to compete with the Bass-owned business next door.
Whilst I'm not certain when it opened, I've been informed by someone who was living in the area well before my inward migration that it closed in the 1960s. With the two breweries having merged in 1927 and having spent a load of dosh doing up the Rodney in 1959 Bass Worthington probably decided that the New Inn was now redundant. After closure it spent some of its time housing a hairdressers before being demolished in 1975, providing additional parking space for its neighbour.
So the New Inn is gone, but its image still lives on in this colourised postcard from the early part of the 20th century. If we pass the pub and journey a couple of hundred yards further along the road we'll come to the original subject of this post, but I'll leave that for another day.
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