51 replies to this topic

[dolomite]

Brilliant!  But how on earth did you find it?  I am full of admiration (and some Greene King Abbot Ale).

 

Now we have the WHERE, all we need is the WHY and WHEN

Largely by accident. A bit of Google searching brought up the ‘Thatched Pubs Project’ website. I skipped through a few of its pages at random and one that caught my eye was the pub with its own airfield. It struck me that could perhaps be the kind of place that 1930s Bentley boys might like to pay a visit, so I looked more closely at that pub and the more I examined it the more similar it looked to the original photo. 

[BRG]

Stellar work, sir.

 

Roadhouses (as they were sometimes called in the interwar years) along the trunk roads often had extra attractions.  Local to me was the Ace of Spades on the A3 Kingston By-Pass at Chessington had a ballroom and a swimming pool, as well as having an airstrip, although where that lay in what is now a largely built-up area is not clear.  But unlike the Fountain, the Ace which was an unthatched mock Tudor building from the 1920s now only survives as a golf equipment store these days, although the name is still used for the A3 underpass that is there now.