Broad Street was a street of inns. The White Lion and the White Hart stood a few doors away, and both were among the houses admitted to Bristol’s Guild of Innholders when it was set up in March 1606. The innkeepers needed somewhere to meet, and they found it behind No. 51.
The Innholders’ Hall
In 1620 the Bartholomew feoffees renewed the lease of “a tenement containing two chambers called the Innholders Hall … in Broad Street near a place called the Tennis Court” to William Greene, master of the Company of Innholders. A new lease followed in 1652. By 1700 it was held by the widow Arthur, with Robert Green as tenant, and it was included in Samuel Packer’s lease with its promise of £100 of rebuilding.
The tennis court nearby would have been a court for real tennis, the indoor game played by gentlemen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1730 part of the property, “a tenement and warehouse in Bear Lane”, was leased to Richard Lewis, a mariner, and was then in the hands of William Stephens, a linen draper. In 1815 the same holding went to Philip Taylor, a baker.
Browns Taverne becomes the Cyder House
The rear part of No. 51, Hugh Yong’s “Browns Taverne” of 1522, was leased in 1617 to Abel Kitchen. It had lately been in the tenure of Edward Chetwynd, a Doctor of Divinity. In 1634 it was described as a tenement, two gardens, a pavement and a cellar. The lease passed to Robert Kitchen in 1645 and to Sarah Kitchen in 1662.
In 1699 it was described as being “in the tennis court” and leased to Samuel Packer. It went to William Horton, a clothier, in 1707, and to John Tyler, a hooper (a maker of the hoops for barrels), in 1729. By then it was a tenement and garden “called the Cyder House”. In 1799 a lease of “the through house and cellar … called the Cyder House” was granted to Thomas Holden.
Bristol’s Lost Pubs records licensees of the Cider House Tavern in Cider House Passage, off Broad Street, from 1752 to 1863, and a Bird in Hand in the same passage in 1816. The passage between Nos. 51 and 52 still carries the name, though most people walk past it without noticing. Metal gates were put across it in 1990.
The cellars
Cellars are mentioned in 1634 and again in 1799, and the long life of the site raises an obvious question: how much of what lies under No. 51 today is older than the Victorian building above it? If you have been in the cellars, or know of any survey of them, we would very much like to hear from you.