The Long Room

The controversial Long Room on Mutley Plain, is the third Long Room to grace the Three Towns in the last 250 years. In the middle of the eighteenth century there was a fashionable and somewhat isolated establishment on the Stonehouse Peninsula to which “all genteel company never failed to resort from both Dock (Devonport) and Plymouth”. In 1780 however Lord Edgcumbe, who owned most of East Stonehouse (the Edgcumbe estate itself was West Stonehouse) sold a substantial part of it to the Royal Marines who immediately began work on the new barracks there.

The original Longroom building, although still standing, was adapted for other uses. However before too long, another establishment, within a short distance of the original, opened as the Longroom Inn. This modest corner premises was named in honour of its neighbour rather than in reference to its shape and size, unlike the current Long Room, which like the original, is a long room.