Navy Hotel

If you were going to run a pub in Devonport in the late-eighteenth, early-nineteenth centuries, when the Dockyard was at its busiest with plenty of comings and goings centred on
the Napoleonic Wars, where would you want to be? Answer, most probably, just outside the Dockyard gates – here at the bottom of Fore Street.

There were half a dozen hostelries within a stone’s throw of the gate, including, here on the southern side, the Dock Gates Inn itself, the Fountain (formerly known as the Naval Rendezvous) and the Navy Hotel – not much doubt about the market they were pitching for! All three went in one fell swoop however when Aggie Weston’s altogether more respectable Royal Sailor’s Rest was built here in 1876.

Today the old gates still stand and this site is now part of the area being redeveloped as the Dockyard extension wall of the 1950s slowly starts to disappear.

Licensees

1812 - Hannah Brickman
1838 - D Fagan
1844 - Michael Malone
1850 - Benjamin Moon
1862 - Joseph Pascoe
1864 - W Southwood
1870 - Richard Pawlyn