Description

This list entry was subjected to a Minor Enhancement on 2 April 2024 to amend details in the description, add Historical note and source and reformat the text to current standards

SE 3220 NE
1/276

WESTGATE (south side), No. 109 (The Elephant and Castle Public House)

GV

II

Public house with an early-C20 fanciful-styled frontage.

Built of red brick with terracotta and faience dressings and a slated roof, this is a two-storey building of three bays facing Westgate. The outer bays have large, shaped pediments, the central bay having a small segmental pediment; these three pediments feature raised gold lettering on terracotta scrolls reading ‘Elephant and Castle’. They are all above the blocking course of an entablature with frieze. The various first-floor windows are pedimented, mostly with open-based segmental pediments. The ground- floor frontage features glazed brown tiles with pilasters, spandrels and frieze ornamented in gold and green. The entrance is to the central bay and is round-arched, the flanking bays having wide, four-centred arches.

Listing NGR: SE3288020674

History

Westgate was one of Wakefield’s four principal medieval streets. In the C17 and C18 it became a popular residential district for the mercantile classes. Local tax records suggest that there was a public house on this site from at least the mid-C18. There is an early reference to the inn as the Elephant and Castle in a notice in the London Gazette on 12 August 1775, concerning a meeting of the creditors of Thomas Smith, a bankrupt wine merchant. There are records for the public house through the C19. In 1894 it was acquired by Warwick & Co, Boroughbridge. Plans were submitted the following year for alterations; however, the elaborate tiled and terracotta frontage (a good example of Edwardian use of the frontage of a public house to form an advertisement), dates to the early C20. It is shown in plans submitted on 20 July 1903 by the architect J Jackson of Barry Street Bradford. Ownership passed to John Smith’s of Tadcaster in 1925.

External Links

• Wikidata Q26550160

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Recommended Books

• 
  This Old House: Restoring, Rehabilitating, and Renovating an Older House
• 
  Georgian Style and Design for Contemporary Living
• 
  Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Peterborough (Pevsner Architectural Guides): Written by Charles O'Brien, 2014 Edition, Publisher: Yale University Press [Hardcover]
• 
  Period property manual, victorian house manual 2 books collection set by ian rock
• 
  Listed Buildings and Other Heritage Assets
• 
  ENGLAND GUIDE TO POST WAR LISTED: A Guide to Post-war Listed Buildings