Historians’ website tells the stories of old Newmarket pubs including The Carlton, The Victory and The Palomino

How many people have heard of The Greenwich Pensioner, remember enjoying a pint in The Prohibition or playing pool in The Black Horse?

All pubs among the many whose names have long since faded from the memory and, in many cases, whose very buildings have disappeared from the streets of Newmarket.

But their names, together with more than 100 others, now feature on a website meticulously researched by local historians Tony Pringle and Peter Norman.

Pubs were once integral elements in the social fabric of towns like Newmarket. They not only provided places for people to drink together and socialise but provided venues for everything from property auctions to wedding receptions and inquests.

Such was the number of pubs and hostelries in Newmarket they even inspired celebrated Fordham Victorian poet James Withers to write his own homage to them back in 1855 called The Lay of the Luckless One or The Topers Lament, which contains the names of no less than 30.

One stanza reads: “I liked the beer at the Black Bear, The brewing of Old Bruin; The Stars and Moon both sirens were to lure me on to ruin.”

The Black Bear Withers refers to was on the corner of Black Bear Lane, while the Half Moon once stood in the High Street, opposite the Terrace.

The Star Hotel was on the corner of Sun Lane where Pizza Express now trades. It closed in 1964. It had been one of the few hotels with a tap.

“These were basically beer bars,” said Tony, “usually at the other end of a large hotel yard – the idea being to keep the peasants away from the hotel guests.”

The Star’s tap later became a bookmakers and the site is now occupied by Victor Victoria coffee shop.

The aforementioned Greenwich Pensioner would have been named after the Greenwich Pensioners who resided at The Royal Hospital at Greenwich, the naval equivalent of the Army’s Chelsea Pensioners, but why it was thought an appropriate name for a pub in East Anglia is a mystery.

According to Tony and Peter’s research it was built in around 1848 in what was then known as Railway Street, which later became Granby Street.

The pub’s name changed around 1869, when it became the Prince of Wales as it is today.

Newmarket’s Icewell Hill, with its myriad of streets and back to back houses, had been a poor but close-knit community.

As the 1960s dawned, it was to be cleared to make way for new blocks of flats. As well as the houses, its two popular pubs, The Victory and The Wheatsheaf, were demolished. The Wheatsheaf was the first to go but landlord Bill Garnham was determined to make sure a small piece of it survived.

He was a friend of St Mary’s Church organist Tom Stonham and he gave him the pub sign. Its bracket now supports the sign for the Turner Hall, in Church Lane, not that far from where the pub once stood.

The Victory, which was one of the town’s oldest pubs, finally closed on New Year’s Day 1964 and was reduced to rubble a month later.

Under an agreement with the owners, brewers Tollemache and Cobbold Ltd was allowed to build a new pub, The Palomino in Valley Way, the first pub to be built in Newmarket since the war.

It opened on November 22, 1963, the day President John F Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas, Texas. Thought to be the only pub in the country with that name, it did not last as long as the two it replaced, closing in 2018.

The last new pub to open in Newmarket was The Prohibition.

This curiously named watering hole, with its 1920s-style decoy, was part of the new Rookery shopping centre development. It welcomed its first customers 50 years ago, a year before the centre was officially opened by Terry Wogan, who popped in for a pint to celebrate.

In 1989 it was gutted by fire and never re-opened.

As for the town’s hotels, the best known was The Carlton, where King Edward VII had dined, Fred Astaire had danced and US servicemen regularly had far too much to drink.

Its imposing facade dominated the High Street for more than 100 years and a generation of Newmarket residents have never forgiven the then Forest Heath council for allowing it to be demolished in 1977.

It was thought to have been built in the 1860s and started life as The Greyhound Hotel before being renamed The Victoria in 1897, probably to coincide with the monarch’s Diamond Jubilee.

In its heyday it boasted 70 bedrooms, 12 self-contained apartments, a ballroom, restaurant and winter gardens and a sweeping staircase of Purbeck marble.

As The Carlton it continued to be the centre for entertainment in the town throughout the 1950s. Members of Newmarket Jazz Club met there and some of the biggest names of the genre played there including Chris Barber, Acker Bilk, Humphrey Lyttleton and Kenny Lynch.

The 1960s proved a decade of financial uncertainty for The Carlton as it lurched from one crisis to another, but in 1973 it was confirmed it had been bought by the film magnate and millionaire Irving Allen for a reputed £100,000 and there seemed a chance it would be restored to its former glory.

But it proved to be a false dawn. Mr Allen’s plans were deemed uneconomic and he sold the hotel to a Peterborough development company for around £60,000.

By then the writing was on what was left of The Carlton’s interior walls. Forest Heath District Council had given its approval for the building to be demolished and replaced with shops with the remainder of the site used the for Rookery development. By early May 1977 the once glorious gothic pile was no more.

One regular remembered: “The Carlton was always more than just a building, it was a kind of crossroads of ideas, lifestyles and happenings. It was a place where people met and felt enriched by being or having been there.”

For Tony, himself once a landlord who ran the former Five Bells in St Mary’s Square, now the town’s Islamic community centre, working on the website has been a labour of love.

“The exact status of each establishment is not always known, some may have been public houses as we know them or mere beer houses, some real hotels, some glorified lodging houses or indeed off licences,” he said.

“Being of the belt and braces brigade, a book will also be compiled, eventually, so there is a hard copy of at least one stage of the project.”

And thanks to Peter Norman, who is the custodian of a wonderful library of photographs of Newmarket he has collected and cherished over the years, the website is packed with pictures recalling a history of licensed premises that could so easily have been lost to future generations.

The website can be found at newmarketpubshistory.co.uk

But looking through the history of the many pubs listed on the website it seems strange, that in the headquarters of British horseracing there was never one called The Racehorse.