The Royal Exchange, Castle Street.

As King William Street was amongst the first part of Hillfields to be developed, the Ivy Cottage (Lost Pubs no 3) opened around1840. Then Victoria Street and Castle Street followed later, as Hillfields grew towards the city, and the Royal Exchange opened around 1868.

The name "Royal Exchange" refers to the building in Cornhill, London, originally built in 1568 by Sir Thomas Gresham as a place for London merchants to transact their business. The first licensee was Miss Emma Elton. It sometimes surprises me how common women licensees were in Victorian Coventry, even unmarried ones.

Phillips and Marriott bought it at an unknown date for five hundred and twenty pounds, sixteen shillings and six pence and by 1900 valued it at two thousand pounds. Although pub prices were increasing rapidly due to the reduction of licenses by the authorities, its four-fold increase may be partly explained by its rebuilding. The building, as it stands at present, is in the style we now term "Brewers Tudor". A pub built in Hillfields in 1868 would not look markedly different from any of the other buildings, as with the Ivy Cottage. "Brewers Tudor" appeared in the last years of the century as the authorities encouraged a move away from terracotta and tiles and recommended the virtues of oak instead. This lead to the "reformed pub", which was meant to be a suburban "inn or tavern of Olde England" as opposed to the unseemly and depraved aberration of the gin palace. Before 1900 would have been an early date, but certainly the Royal Exchange was a forerunner of the style that became universal in the area a decade later.

The pub stood on the corner of Castle Street and Victoria Street, with a row of outbuilding extending along Victoria Street which contained the kitchen, toilets and urinal with a yard to the rear. In 1919, Phillips and Marriott submitted plans to make alterations to the outbuildings, part of which became two storied. This work was completed on 12th June 1920.

Yet on April 7th 1921, the pub closed. I have not authoritative reasons for this, but the Report of the Police Establishment in 1921 states that one public house was closed in that year for "ill conduct". It seems most likely that this was the Royal Exchange. The Royal Exchange's closure came just three year before Phillips and Marriott's demise, at a time when they were in desperate competition with Mitchell's and Butlers, so the loss of an outlet must have hit them very hard.

Following closure, the pub was occupied from 1923 - 1926 by the Howitzers Club, who moved from an outbuilding in Lower Ford Street, and later moved premises in King William Street. At this time, No 4 Castle Street, next door to the pub was a decorators owned by Thomas Harper. In 1926, he took over the put as a showroom, which later became known at "Brightwalls". In 1928, the outbuilding were rebuilt to make shop premises. Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, Brightwalls extended their premises by building a warehouse onto the pub in Castle Street and by buying other properties on both sides of Victoria Street. They must have been a big business at that time.

From the Second World War, the building has suffered from planning blight. All of Brightwalls submissions for planing permissions carried the rider that the building was in an area of comprehensive redevelopment. This was particularly aimed at 1960 - 1962 and 1968. Nothing happened so the buildings still stands a the top of Primrose Hill street, still looking for all the world like a pub, if you ignore the steel shutters and shop signs, 77 years after it ceased to be one. Perhaps we have planning blight to thank for this, but I noticed that recently plans are afoot again the redevelop the area which I bet will result in something far worse replacing the old buildings on Victoria Street.

 Postscript.

The Brighwalls Buildings, formerly the Royal Exchange Public House, were demolished in December 1998 to make way for a new housing development by Focus Housing Association.

This article was first published in "Pint Sides", the newsletter of Coventry and North Warwickshire Branch of the Campaign for Real Ale. It is copied with permission from the author, Fred Luckett, and the publishers.