Home > Hampshire > Cheriton > HH Inn HH Inn

Picture source: Peter Facey

The HH Inn was situated on Cheriton Road. This was one of the few pub names named in initials, and was derived from the Hampshire Hunt. It used to have a skittle alley - I remember playing there. Now used as a private house.

Source: Graham Coombs

There has been quite a bit of debate as to wether the HH is the shortest pub name. Actually, HH is by no means the shortest pub name. Many East Anglian towns with large numbers of pubs seem to have got fed up with giving them names at all and started calling them simply by a single letter. Whittlesey, for example, had an "A", a "B" and a "C". Though latterly they were usually referred to as "The Letter A" etc, the pub signs and the names were originally simply the one letter. In Whittlesey, only the Letter B survived into the 1990s and the last landlord / landlady renamed it the "Bee" a few years ago.

This Inn "bears the sign of the Prince of Wales' Feathers on the plaque at the front. An old picture I've found shows it was a Watney's pub.

Barry Taylor (July 2011)

Just seen your page on the HH Inn. One rainy Saturday night many years ago (early 1980s?) I went into the HH with a bunch of fellow re-enactors, and asked the landlord if he objected to us singing. After we had satisfied him that our material was mostly traditional folk songs, and unlikely to cause offence, he said to go ahead. About 20 minutes later, he came over and joined us, and even chipped in a couple of old songs. It was about this time that I realised that he was none other than Bob Copper, probably the greatest of English traditional folk singers. What I'd done was the folk music equivalent of wandering into Gracelands and asking Elvis if he'd mind us throwing a jam session!

John Lawler (July 2017)

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Name Dates Comments Roger Debenham 1966/1985 I was a customer from the age i started drinking until the pub closed in 1985 my wife worked as barmaid in pub and also the skittle alley refering to your article about singing folk songs along with bob copper in the1980s bob copper had long gone by then when i first started drinking there the landlord was jack west and wife betty then frank hunter and joyce bot