White Lion (Park Street)

It stood just south of the entrance to Park Street off Old Town Street, on a site that, until recently, would have been just inside the Tesco building on the old 1970s Drake Circus site. There was a Red Lion relatively nearby in Ebrington Street and a Golden Lion a little further down Old Town Street. Originally however the stretch of Old Town Street housing the White Lion was known as Tavistock Street – and part of Old Town Without before that.

Generally an heraldic reference to Edward IV (although occasionally the Earls of March … or the Duke of Norfolk), this particular White Lion (there was another in Stonehouse) appears to have closed soon after Tavistock Street was absorbed into Old Town Street in the late 1860s early 1870s. Not that it would have been all that desperately missed – as the principal thoroughfare into the town from the north there were, at one time, early in the nineteenth century, around a dozen licensed premises from just below the library to the back of St Andrew’s Church.

Licensees

1823 - Silas Davie
1844 - William Blatchford
1852 - John Pearse
1862 - Richard Rowse
1864 - Peter Oldrey
1867 - WT Furze
1867 - William Lavers