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Picture source: Clive Schneidau

The London Inn was situated at 9 High Street. This is a grade-II listed building.

My father won about £200.00 on the Spastics pools in 1960. Even that needs explaining today, £200 was a fortune to us and Ian Dury referred to himself as a spastic and the Spastics Society had a football pool in the day. We had only ever had one holiday at this time and we just upped and went from our home in Upminster and we stayed at a bed and breakfast in Bristol, imagine, a hotel thingy!! We also went to a café and ate an evening meal!!!! The next day we drove on and stopped in this village that my dad seemed to know, Uffculme. He enquired at the Commercial Hotel in the Market Square. I think that according to Google Maps, this may now be the Ostler Inn. They would not cater for us because my parents had a six and a nine year old with them. They did however point us up the road to the London Inn, a Starkey’s pub. We were greeted with open arms by Mr & Mrs Guppey (Guppy) who were the names over the door. It was wonderful and the food was sublime. Breakfast, served to the four of us was brought up on a massive meat plate. Eggs galore and a whole pigs bum etc. I asked my father years later about the size of this meat plate and he confirmed it to be (expletive) huge. The London Inn was an old coaching inn and had a courtyard. On the west side of this was a skittle alley the pub on the east side. To the south were the old stables with a hay loft where a yappy dog lived. I was warned not to go up there, but hey I was 6 and there was a yappy dog up there. Great consternation broke out when I was discovered playing with the dog up there. The dog wasn’t dangerous but my god the floor was rotten and unsafe. Anyway, after a good hiding, I just spoke to the dog from the ground! Mr Guppey had a Vauxhall Cresta, a Luton built American design, all fish tails and chrome, I thought it was marvelous. The bar seemed like East Ham High Street to me. Very busy and of course in those days I was not allowed in there so would sit on the stairs looking across the bar to the bonhomie beyond. Ah, they had only just changed from drawing ale from the barrel to beer engines. Consequently they worked the bar with the beer pipes running along and across the floor, once again, fascinating to watch the beer flowing back and forth. One last memory. Mr Guppey received a large water bill and was putting the world to rights re: the unfairness of it all. One of his customers wondered why he bought water when he had his own. The fact was and maybe still is, a spring rises in the south west of the courtyard. Mr Guppey invested in pumps and filters and told the water board where they could go, drawing his own water. I do not know how long this lasted. I doubt whether the water board said, “fair enough”

Trevor Wadham (December 2020)

Listed building details:

Public house. Mid C19, probably contemporary with the adjoining brewery (dated 1858) for which it served as the tap room. Brick, with gable end slate roof. An unspoilt small Victorian public house with its internal arrangement intact. Internal arrangement of small bar (to the left of entrance), tiny snug (to the right), kitchen to extreme right, with private rooms above, all intact. To the rear is the yard, entered through a wagon entrance to the right of the pub, and the yard is enclosed on the right by an outbuilding which, although not built as such, has served as a skittles alley since before the First World War. (The skittles and the return gulley are original). End stacks. 2 storeys. Exterior. Front: 4-window range; 2-light casement windows to first floor, 8 panes per light. Ground floor with C20 window to the bar, with 2 C19 casement windows (as above) to the right. Extending to the right (along High Street) is a random rubble range (with wagon entrance to yard, under front lintel, weather-boarded above); this was probably the stable block with loft access and round ventilators. Interior: much of the contemporary joinery survives.

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