The Hitching Rail: Windlesham's Historic Lost Inns
By Sally Clark, Local Historian
Many of Windlesham's most beautiful private homes and institutions hold a fascinating secret: they began their lives as historic inns and neighbourhood beer houses. If you know where to look, the physical clues of their rowdy past are still waiting to be found.
The Bowling Green Inn (Kennel Lane)
Now known as Windlesham House (standing opposite the Field of Remembrance), this property was once a timber-framed 17th-century inn called the Bowling Green Inn.
The Transformation: In the early 1800s, Admiral Sir Edward Owen bought the inn and masked the original timber structure with a grand Georgian facade.
The Cellars: While a devastating fire destroyed the house in 1988, its extensive cellars survived until the site's recent redevelopment. Up until the mid-1920s, the original wooden "barrel slope" used for rolling beer barrels down into the cellar was still completely intact.
Woodcote House School (Snows Ride)
The left-hand side of Woodcote House School is purported to have been a mid-18th-century timber inn.
Recent extensions uncovered physical evidence of this history, including a wooden sub-structure preserved beneath a quarry-tiled floor. On the outer wall at ground level, passersby can still spot a historic wooden hatch through which barrels were rolled down into the arched cellars below.
A Piece of History: In 1816, the property was purchased by the Rev. James Pears to establish his school. During renovations by the Paterson family in 1931, removing an old fireplace revealed two historic pennies, including one bearing the head of King George III.
The Fox (Hatton Hill)
Directly opposite Woodside House, an 1853 military map of Chobham Common records a bustling beer house called The Fox. By 1860, it was renamed the Rose and Crown under landlord William Taylor.
In 1863, local cabinet maker Thomas Mathews (great-grandfather of resident Shirley Henderson) was hired to build onto the beer house, transforming it into two semi-detached cottages. When these cottages were redeveloped in the late 1970s, builders discovered that the older left-hand semi-detached cottage still retained its original beer house features, including its historic earthen floor.
Tales of Highwaymen: Dick Turpin at the Inn
Windlesham's historic inns were famous stops for travelers, and the criminals who preyed on them.
In the historic 1923 Windlesham Pageant, Scene VI was set in the parlor of the Bowling Green Inn. It dramatised a legendary local meeting where infamous highwaymen Dick Turpin and Captain Snow planned a hold-up, intending to meet the celebrated French highwayman Claude Duval (who operated circa 1643–1670) at The Fox under the Hill on Hatton Hill.
The Alma Beer House (Broadway Road)
From the late 1800s, the Hill family ran the Alma Beer House on Broadway Road.
The Layout: Locals entered the public bar via the first door on the right. Next door was the "Bottle and Jug" lounge, where women could comfortably enter to have a personal jug filled with ale to take home.
The Atmosphere: The bar counter featured a traditional sawdust-filled "spittle tray" at its base, and simple food like a classic "Ploughman’s Lunch" was served.
By the 1950s, the arrival of television drastically reduced pub-going habits. The Simmonds Brewery closed the doors of the Alma, and a brewery director subsequently purchased and converted the historic pub into a private home. You can still spot a plaster mold of a dove and rabbit on the side of the house where the old “Simmonds – Ales and Stout” sign once hung.