Cattle Market Inn

It stood on a site now swallowed up by the new Drake Circus shopping mall, just down from that point where the long-gone Park Street fed into the upper part of Old Town Street … and close by the entrance to the old cattle market – hence the name.

Redevelopment is no recent phenomenon however and during its fifty-odd year existence the Cattle Market Inn witnessed a number changes. Indeed it started out as part of Tavistock Street (No.24, then No.48) and later, in the 1870s, it became part of Old Town Street (No.56). Sometime around the turn of the century, when the original Drake Circus (which later famously sported the Guinness Clock) was being built and much of Old Town Street was being widened and improved, the Cattle Market Inn was absorbed into William Spear’s flourishing drapery business, which then occupied six properties on the corner of Park Street and Old Town Street (roughly in the middle of this view).

Licensees

1857 - Susan Nicholas
1862 - William Chapple
1877 - Charles Neyle
1880 - Robert Higgins
1885 - Henry Luscombe
1895 - T Menhinick