WITH regard to your article in last week’s Guardian regarding the age of the Rose and Crown in King Street, given as being 374 years old and thus being built in 1641, it may be of interest to Guardian readers that the building was not continuously in use as a public house.
The licensed inn trade in Knutsford had declined disastrously in the early 19th century, forcing the closure of several inns including the Rose and Crown and adjoining Hat and Feather – this now the site of the former King’s Coffee House, i.e. La Belle Epoque.
In circa-1850 my great-great maternal grandfather, Tom Lee, bought these two ancient and by then decrepit buildings for a song but without the capital to further develop them. At that time the two inns were being used as cheap living accommodation for poor families and local, mainly Irish, labourers.
Before he died in 1874 Tom Lee willed the Rose and Crown to his 15-year old son, George, and the Hat and Feather to his 11-year old son, Fred – my great grandfather.
The two inns would have continued to be rented until the two young men came of age in the 1880s.
However, in the mid-1890s, Fred Lee sold the Hat and Feather to Richard Harding Watt to allow him to build the King’s Coffee House and Gaskell Memorial Tower, while George sold the Rose and Crown to Groves and Whitnall, a Salford brewery, who developed it in the pseudo-Tudor style we see today.
John Howard Knutsford
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