South Devon Hotel

Researching the history of places that take us back long before the memories of anyone around us can often be confusing and there is more than one example locally of a pub that changed its name in a street that also changed its name, so it looks like we’re dealing with completely separate premises, then there is the case of the South Devon Hotel in Frankfort Street. Here we have an establishment that was listed in 1847 as being in Raleigh Street, in 1850 as being in Frankfort Street and in 1857 as being in King Street. Throughout that time it stood unmoved on a site now occupied by the pavement just outside Littlewoods in New George Street, but which then was the meeting place of four thoroughfares, Cambridge Street, Raleigh Street, King Street and Frankfort Street.

Named, one would guess, in anticipation of the arrival in Plymouth of Brunel’s South Devon Railway (begun in 1846 it arrived in 1849), it appears to have been short-lived, a victim of the redevelopment of that part of Frankfort Street in the late 1870s, co-incidentally shortly after the South Devon Railway amalgamated with the Great Western Railway (1 February 1876).

Licensees

1847 - Henry McKeevar Westcott
1857 - Emily Elliott
1862 - H Lee
1865 - James May
1877 - William Marshall