Tomorrow, at The Cricketers on Addiscombe Road, there’s a day-and-night-long ‘lock-in’ from 4pm to midnight, called ‘(Pub)lic House’, to celebrate Croydon pub culture, that will include music, workshops and a film screening led by PHOEBE WAGNER and her father, ROGER WAGNER.
With pub closures happening almost weekly, here Roger Wagner makes the case for saving The Glamorgan, the historic pub building on Cherry Orchard Road
Real estate company Butler Walsall’s latest, 2024 planning application for the Glamorgan pub argues that this building has no community merit in terms of historic or heritage or social and cultural or economic associations.
Well they would, wouldn’t they?
As prospective developers of the site, they (non-Croydon residents) would prefer we saw it as just “a building”, which they would replace with a residential tower.
Planning Applications for redevelopment are not a noted source of deeply researched historic or heritage or social and cultural or economic data. So…
Economic
Butler Walsall bought The Glamorgan as a going concern. They did not apply for a licence to run it as a pub, but instead plastered the building with notices that they intended to demolish. Since they had not applied for planning permission, that got nowhere. The SaveTheGlam Campaign secured Asset of Community Value protection till 2023, but the legal protections are time-limited.
The photograph above was taken about 1934 – a century after the pub’s foundation – when the pub was part of the Charrington Brewery estate. The Horse and Groom, The Glamorgan after 2006 or The Grouse and Claret as it had been since 1993, harmonises well with two-storey residential and commercial buildings to its north and west, of which it is part. Like Croydon’s cherry orchard, the old Cherry Orchard Road to the south is lost to modern tower blocks.
The pub was built before the intrusion of East Croydon Station in 1841, with a cellar which defines the footprint of the building on its corner plot to this day.
This building is an authentic pre-Victorian pub.
Heritage
The only pub older on this side of Croydon is The Windmill (1822-2023) which is sadly derelict and was subject to a suspected arson attack at the end of August 2023. Arson of the top floor of a derelict pub is the all-too-common way to ensure it cannot be saved. At least our pub was spared that indignity!
The Glamorgan: genuine example of a pre-Victorian pub
Butler Walsall’s assessment of the historic and architectural value of The Glamorgan is poorly researched and defective.
The assertion that the building is substantially “modified” is made without evidence.
The evidence externally of four separate entrances to what would have been distinct public, saloon, private and snug bars and associated garden amounts to authentic 19th-century “improvements” to the existing public house building in the face of a burgeoning evangelical and temperance movement.
Inside there is no evidence of extensive re-modelling. And the cool cellar is excellent.
The existing building marks the singular point where the canyon of modern tower developments beside East Croydon Station on the footprint of the lost ancient community cherry orchard gives way to authentic 19th century East Croydon. This settlement was planted on the east side of historic Croydon Common following privatisation in the Croydon Enclosure Acts 1799 and 1800, near the location – Cross Road – where the cherry orchard to the south – along Cherry Orchard Road – gave way to developments on the former common. Here is where East Croydon begins.
The pub was built where the still extant passage from Oval Road emerges onto Cherry Orchard Road. This is the remnant of the path which at the time The Horse and Groom was built connected with the brewery yard of Addiscombe House, the military academy of the East India Company. At that time the private chartered company was engaged in an eventually successful campaign of persuading its prospective officers in India to drink good English pale ale, rather than the debilitating strong spirits they might meet in India (or Croydon Town for that matter).
India Pale Ale had to be well-hopped to ensure it was drinkable after the turbulent voyage around the Cape of Good Hope (no Suez Canal in those days) to India. IPA is now a world beer style. Apart from the Academy itself, this pub is where the cadets became… acclimatised.
IPA: ‘the beer that built an empire’
After 1834, the company permitted graduate cadets to ride their ponies along this route towards Croydon town, a privilege denied to junior cadets.
In the neighbourhood beside the pub was a small smithy (the shell still extant) where their mounts could be serviced while the senior cadets quaffed ale and porter, served until the end of the East India Company in 1857, by Stephen Rose.
Stephen Rose was probably brother-in-law of “Mother Rose”, whose cottage on Addiscombe Road served their needs for laundry, livery, garment care and repair, haberdashery, boot care, leather care and repair, nursing and home comforts.
It is probable that at The Horse and Groom the cadets learned to love the bright amber India Pale Ale brewed at Addiscombe House. It was now being commercially produced to be shipped – preserved by its high hop content – to India.
India Pale Ale was seen as a more “noble” beverage more aligned with their future status as civilised white commanders of the East India Company’s private army of Indian sepoys, which was bigger than the British Army at the time. Noted beer writer Pete Brown in Hope and Glory (2009) calls IPA “the beer that built the British Empire”.
Well-hopped IPAs are brewed across the globe today. Defined by the source of their hops, there are Pacific IPAs, New England IPAs, West Coast IPAs and all stations between. Croydon is where they began their march to world significance, in the domestic brewery of Addiscombe Military Academy and The Horse and Groom – The Glamorgan.
Social and Cultural
A pub is a community hub, a place to meet and socialise with your neighbours. Churches and chapels provided community hubs when the English were all active Christians, but that bond is long gone. Butler Walsall – and a developer like them – is betting on pubs going the same way.
This pub also provided distinctive food for the residents and visitors of East Croydon (remember Bunny Chow?). And some of us remember lively musical entertainments in what was once The Horse and Groom.
It was never “just a pub”. If it is lost, it is lost forever, like the common and the cherry orchard.
Read more: Glamorgan pub plan shows it is asset of community value
Read more: #SaveTheGlam: Council grants ACV status to historic pub
- Roger Wagner is a retired school teacher and still active pub musician, and historian
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Very good article. Thanks, Roger!