The Coaching Inns of Highgate

A Village Built on Hospitality

To understand the coaching inns of Highgate, one must first understand the particular geography that made them necessary. Highgate Hill, rising steeply from the valley of the Fleet to a summit over four hundred feet above sea level, was one of the most formidable obstacles on the road between London and the north of England. Every traveller heading out of the capital on the Great North Road — whether on horseback, in a private carriage, or aboard a public stagecoach — had to climb this hill, and by the time they reached the top, both horses and humans were in need of refreshment. The village of Highgate grew up to meet this need, and the coaching inns that lined its streets were the commercial heart of the settlement, the institutions around which the entire economy of the hilltop village revolved.

By the eighteenth century, Highgate had more inns and taverns per head of population than almost any other village in the south of England. The coaching trade demanded a vast infrastructure of stabling, accommodation, and catering, and the village's publicans competed fiercely for the business of the travellers who streamed through their doors. The competition was not merely commercial but social: the reputation of an inn depended not just on the quality of its food and drink but on the character of its landlord, the comfort of its rooms, the speed of its horse changes, and the warmth of its welcome. A good coaching inn was a complex operation, requiring the coordination of kitchen, bar, stables, and guest rooms, and the men and women who ran them were among the most capable and energetic businesspeople of their era.

The inns of Highgate catered to every class of traveller. At the top of the market were the posting houses, which served the private carriages of the wealthy and provided fresh horses for those who could afford to travel post — that is, with relay horses hired at each staging post along the road. Below them were the coaching inns proper, which served the public stagecoach services and offered accommodation, meals, and horse changes to the passengers and crews of the daily coaches. And at the bottom were the alehouses and taverns, which served the drovers, carriers, and foot travellers who used the road in their thousands — the ordinary people for whom the journey north was not a luxury but a necessity.

The Gatehouse

The Gatehouse Inn, which took its name from the medieval toll gate that once stood at the top of Highgate Hill, was one of the most prominent coaching establishments in the village. It occupied a commanding position at the junction of Highgate High Street and the road leading down to Hampstead, directly opposite the site where the old gate had been, and its sign was one of the first things that travellers saw as they crested the hill and entered the village proper. The inn was a substantial building, with extensive stabling at the rear and a cobbled yard where the coaches drew up to change horses and set down passengers. Its tap room was a gathering place for coachmen and ostlers, and its dining room served meals to the wealthier travellers who could afford to eat well on the road.

The Gatehouse had a particular distinction among Highgate's inns: it was one of the principal venues for the ceremony of Swearing on the Horns, the bizarre initiation ritual that was practised on travellers passing through the village for the first time. The inn's landlords took considerable pride in this association, and the horns that were used in the ceremony were displayed prominently in the bar, a visible advertisement of the inn's role as the guardian of one of London's most eccentric traditions. The combination of the coaching trade and the Horns ceremony made The Gatehouse one of the most famous inns in north London, and its name was known to travellers throughout the south of England and beyond.

The building that stands on the site today — now called The Gatehouse and operating as a pub and theatre venue — is not the original coaching inn, though it incorporates some elements of the earlier structure. The site has been continuously licensed since at least the sixteenth century, making it one of the oldest commercial premises in Highgate, and the pub's survival, in however altered a form, is a testament to the enduring importance of the location. The corner of Highgate High Street where The Gatehouse stands remains one of the focal points of village life, and the pub continues to serve the social function that its coaching-era predecessor performed — as a meeting place, a gathering point, and a centre of the community's public life.

The Flask

The Flask, on Highgate West Hill, is perhaps the most beloved of all Highgate's historic pubs, and its history as a coaching inn is inseparable from its broader significance as one of the finest examples of a traditional English public house anywhere in London. The pub takes its name from the flasks that were once sold there to visitors to the nearby Hampstead Heath — small glass bottles filled with the chalybeate spring water that was believed to have medicinal properties — but its importance in the coaching era derived from its position on the western approach to the village, where the road from Hampstead and the Vale of Health joined the main route through Highgate.

The Flask's current building dates principally from the eighteenth century, though there has been a licensed premises on the site since at least the seventeenth century. The interior retains many of its original features — panelled walls, low ceilings, narrow passageways, and a series of small, interconnected rooms that give the pub the intimate, labyrinthine character that is so often lost in modern renovations. In the coaching era, these rooms served distinct functions: the public bar was for the coachmen and ostlers, the saloon bar for the better-off passengers, and the snug for the landlord's personal guests and for the private conversations that were an important part of village social life. The stables at the rear of the pub, now converted to other uses, once housed the horses that served the western approaches to the village.

The Flask's literary associations are as notable as its coaching history. Dick Turpin, the highwayman, is said to have drunk there — a claim that is almost certainly apocryphal but that adds a pleasing layer of criminal romance to the pub's history. More reliably, the pub has been associated with the painter William Hogarth, who lived nearby and who is said to have used the Flask as a model for some of the tavern scenes in his engravings. In more recent times, the pub has attracted a literary clientele that has included numerous writers, artists, and intellectuals drawn to its atmosphere of comfortable antiquity, and it remains, to this day, one of the most atmospheric and historically significant pubs in London.

The Angel and The Red Lion

The Angel Inn, which stood on the High Street near the top of Highgate Hill, was one of the principal coaching establishments in the village during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was a large, well-appointed inn, with extensive stabling and a reputation for the quality of its food and drink, and it served as one of the main horse-changing stations on the Great North Road's route through Highgate. The Angel's position, near the crest of the hill where the road levelled out after the punishing climb from the valley, made it a natural stopping point for coaches and their passengers, and the inn's yard was a scene of constant activity during the coaching era's golden age.

The Angel also served as a meeting place for the various local organisations and societies that flourished in Highgate during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The inn's assembly room — a large, well-proportioned room on the upper floor — hosted dances, lectures, concerts, and public meetings, and it was here that many of the decisions affecting the life of the village were debated and made. The inn's landlord was often a figure of considerable local influence, combining the roles of publican, entrepreneur, and community leader in a way that was typical of the coaching-era innkeeper. The Angel's closure, which came in the wake of the coaching trade's decline, deprived the village of one of its most important social institutions, and the building was eventually demolished and replaced by residential properties.

The Red Lion and Sun, another of Highgate's historic inns, stood on the northern side of the village, where the road began its descent towards Finchley and the open country beyond. Like The Angel, it was a substantial coaching establishment with extensive stabling, and it served the traffic heading both north from London and south from the Midlands and beyond. The inn's name — a combination of two heraldic symbols that may have reflected successive landlords' loyalties — was a familiar landmark on the Great North Road, and its sign was mentioned in numerous coaching guides and travellers' accounts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Red Lion and Sun survived the decline of the coaching trade and continues to operate as a pub, though the stables and the coaching yard have long since been converted to other uses.

The Ostlers and Their World

The men who made the coaching inns function were the ostlers — the stablemen and grooms who tended the horses, performed the changeovers, and maintained the stabling and equipment that were essential to the operation of the coaching system. The ostler's was a physically demanding and highly skilled occupation, requiring a deep knowledge of horses, a practised efficiency in harnessing and unharnessing teams, and the stamina to work long hours in all weathers. At a busy staging post like Highgate, the ostlers might change dozens of teams in a single day, working from dawn until well after dark during the peak coaching season, and the speed with which they could perform a changeover — typically between ninety seconds and three minutes for a full team of four — was a matter of considerable professional pride.

The ostlers lived and worked in conditions that would be considered harsh by modern standards. Their accommodation was usually a room above the stables, where the heat from the horses below provided a degree of warmth in winter but where the smell and the noise were a constant companion. Their pay was modest, supplemented by tips from the coachmen and passengers, and their working hours were dictated by the coaching timetable rather than by any consideration of rest or comfort. Yet the ostlers of the coaching era were proud of their skills and their status, and they formed a distinct occupational community with its own traditions, its own hierarchy, and its own sense of professional identity.

The hierarchy of the coaching inn was precisely graduated. At the top was the landlord, who owned or leased the premises and who bore ultimate responsibility for the quality of the service. Below him was the head ostler, who managed the stables and coordinated the horse changes; then the under-ostlers, who performed the physical work of harnessing and unharnessing; then the stable boys, who mucked out the stalls, fed and watered the horses, and performed the innumerable minor tasks that kept the operation running smoothly. In the kitchen, a similar hierarchy obtained, with the cook, the scullions, and the serving staff all occupying their allotted places. And in the bar, the tapster and the pot boys served the ale and the spirits that fuelled the conviviality of the coaching era. Taken together, a large coaching inn like The Angel or The Gatehouse might employ thirty or forty people — a substantial workforce for a small village.

The Fox and Crown and Other Establishments

Beyond the major coaching inns, Highgate supported a constellation of smaller drinking establishments that catered to the lower end of the market — the drovers, carriers, and foot travellers who could not afford the prices charged by the posting houses and coaching inns. The Fox and Crown, which stood on the western side of the village near the junction with the road to Hampstead, was one of these humbler establishments, a small, unpretentious alehouse that served the working people of the village and the passing traffic of the road. Its clientele was rougher than that of The Angel or The Gatehouse, and its atmosphere was correspondingly more raucous, but it served an essential social function as a place where the village's labourers, tradesmen, and servants could meet, drink, and exchange news.

The Wrestlers, another Highgate establishment with coaching-era origins, took its name from the wrestling matches that were held in its yard — a form of entertainment that was popular among the working classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that drew crowds from across north London. The pub's yard, which was large enough to accommodate a ring and a substantial number of spectators, was also used for cock-fighting, bear-baiting, and other blood sports that, while repugnant to modern sensibilities, were a routine feature of English popular culture well into the Victorian era. The Wrestlers' landlords profited both from the entrance fees charged for these events and from the drink consumed by the spectators, and the pub's reputation as an entertainment venue complemented the more sedate hospitality offered by the village's larger inns.

The sheer number of licensed premises in Highgate during the coaching era was remarkable. At the peak of the coaching trade, in the early nineteenth century, a village with a resident population of perhaps two or three thousand supported upwards of twenty pubs, inns, and alehouses — a ratio of drinking establishments to inhabitants that astonished even contemporary observers. The explanation, of course, was that the pubs were not serving the resident population alone but the vast numbers of travellers who passed through the village on the Great North Road, many of whom stopped for refreshment even if they did not stay overnight. The pubs of Highgate were, in effect, serving a transient population that vastly outnumbered the village's permanent residents, and it was this transient trade, rather than local demand, that sustained the extraordinary density of drinking establishments.

Decline and Survival

The coaching trade's decline in the 1840s and 1850s, brought about by the opening of the Great Northern Railway, was devastating for Highgate's inns. The stagecoaches that had provided their livelihood for centuries vanished from the road within a single decade, and the inns were left to find new sources of income or face closure. Some adapted successfully, reinventing themselves as residential hotels or as local pubs serving the village's growing population of commuters and suburban residents. Others were less fortunate, and the second half of the nineteenth century saw a steady attrition of Highgate's licensed premises, as one after another of the smaller alehouses and taverns closed their doors for the last time.

The inns that survived did so by adapting to the changed circumstances. The Flask, The Gatehouse, and the Red Lion and Sun all made the transition from coaching inns to local pubs, shedding their stabling and their coaching infrastructure but retaining their licenses and their position at the centre of village social life. The process of adaptation was not always smooth — there were years of reduced trade and financial difficulty — but the pubs that came through the transition emerged as stronger, more focused establishments, serving a local clientele rather than a transient one and developing the character of neighbourhood institutions that they retain to this day.

What survives of the coaching era in Highgate is a matter of both fabric and spirit. The physical remains are fragmentary — a cobbled yard here, a stable block there, the ghost of a coaching arch in the wall of a modern building — but the spirit of the coaching inns lives on in the village's pub culture, which is among the most vibrant and distinctive in London. The Flask, with its panelled rooms and its air of comfortable antiquity, is as fine an example of an English pub as one could hope to find anywhere in the country, and The Gatehouse continues to serve as a centre of the village's social and cultural life. These pubs are the direct descendants of the coaching establishments that made Highgate famous, and their survival, through all the changes and upheavals of the past two centuries, is a testament to the enduring importance of the English pub as a social institution and a place of community.

Legacy of the Coaching Era

The coaching inns of Highgate shaped the village in ways that extend far beyond the physical buildings that housed them. They created the street pattern, with its wide High Street designed to accommodate the turning of coaches and the marshalling of horse teams. They established the village's reputation for hospitality, a reputation that survives in the proliferation of restaurants, cafes, and pubs that characterise modern Highgate. And they attracted the wealthy residents who built the Georgian and Victorian houses that give the village its distinctive architectural character — houses that were designed to take advantage of the hilltop's views and its convenient position on the main road north.

The coaching inns also contributed to Highgate's sense of itself as a community with a distinct identity. The rivalry between the inns, the traditions of the coaching era — including the ceremony of Swearing on the Horns — and the social life that revolved around the tap rooms and dining rooms of the village's pubs all helped to create a sense of local belonging that transcended the transient nature of the coaching trade. The people of Highgate may have made their living from travellers, but they were not themselves transients; they were a settled community with its own customs, its own institutions, and its own pride, and the coaching inns were the places where this community identity was most visibly expressed.

Today, the coaching era is remembered in Highgate with a mixture of nostalgia and scholarly interest. Local historians have documented the history of the village's inns with impressive thoroughness, and the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution maintains a collection of coaching-era artefacts and documents that provides a detailed record of the trade and its impact on the village. The annual heritage walks that are organised by local societies invariably include the sites of the principal coaching inns among their stopping points, and visitors to the village are encouraged to trace the route that the coaches once followed, from the foot of Highgate Hill to the summit and on to the descent towards Finchley. In these ways, the memory of the coaching inns is kept alive, a reminder that Highgate owes its existence, its character, and its distinctive identity to the traffic that once passed through it on the Great North Road.

*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*