Home > Surrey > Thames Ditton > Ye Olde Harrow Ye Olde Harrow
Date of photo: 1969	Picture source: Michael Deschamps
Ye Olde Harrow was situated on Weston Green Road. This pub was opened c1745 and has now been demolished with houses built on the site.
Source: Veronica Whittall
I lived on and off near Ye Olde Harrow in the 1980’s and as a child in the early 1970’s, I first went there to see the Morris Dancers under floodlights on the front car park. The publicans were Mike & Naomi, and I was friends with their son a little younger than me. His bedroom was the centre front window above the pub. It was tiny! When I was old enough, the publicans were Barry and Barbara Watkins, who did well from it from the early 1980’s to about 1990. They had a Jack Russell pub dog who freely roamed Weston Green. Under Barry and Barbara’s tenure, they offered very good dining, from Steaks to Ploughmans lunches. They made a lot of effort to please restaurant guests as pubs at the time transitioned away from drinking houses to restaurant focused pubs offering a social meeting place. After Barry & Barbara moved to Cornwall, Ye Olde Harrow struggled with a string of landlords. One of them had a mobile disco playing numbers to an empty pub to attract younger drinkers.That kept many 20-somethings, including me, away. Another ownership was three entrepreneurs in grey suits who obviously had no idea how to run a pub. On Valentines day 1996, was the worst meal experience in my life! It stuck out in me because it was that bad. It was a set menu, and the waiter/owner/businessman in a suit said it was Lamb. Just Lamb, not something culinary like Welsh Minted Lamb. He just said the word - Lamb. The waiting time for our food was a mind-numbingly boring 55 minutes, and when it arrived, it was tepid, tasteless and tough. The potatoes and vegetables were soggy in an oily gravy. We recognised they had already served it to another table guest who turned it away, and the server carried it into the kitchen only to walk straight back out and brought it to our table. The bill? Over £30 and that's without alcohol. That was expensive for a pub meal for two in its day. I was too polite to say anything. Their marketing material made a big deal about having a clay oven in the kitchen. The pub became Mamma Angela, an Italian restaurant, and the food was good, akin to Bella Pasta. The location wasn’t right for because the building didn't have a high enough foot-fall to fill a niche restaurant business model, Thames Ditton being a dormitory town, and students from Esher College preferring fast food. My last visit was in 2005, and it made a very nice lunchtime restaurant, and its name was Ye Olde Harrow again. It was owned by an Asian couple and reasonably priced provided traditional English pub grub. The evenings were quiet and its market was mainly Esher College staff and students on lunch break wanting a change from their in-house college refectory. I had plenty of bar experience from the 1980’s, and I considered buying the pub and turning it into a carvery or franchising it as a Harvester, but the restaurant wasn't large enough. After seeing a Harvester in Chessington fail, my mortgage pennies couldn't reach the exorbitant cost of extending the building on its North side to accommodate a new open-plan restaurant, I got cold feet. I next saw Ye Olde Harrow looking sad boarded up and ending over 300 years of history. It surprised me it wasn’t Grade II listed, given its colourful history and onetime focal point of Weston Green. Its death knell as a drinking pub, and the pub industry was the introduction of social media and online dating.
Jason Bennison (December 2020)
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Date of photo: 1969	Picture source: Michael Deschamps