Did you know... The Three Tuns Inn

Few visitors who contemplate Portsmouth Cathedral in its green setting of grass, trees, roses or crocuses (depending on the season) realise how hemmed in and congested it was around the church until the late 19th century; in fact the church could scarcely be seen from the High Street. In 1853 the churchyard was closed for burials in when the new Highland Road Cemetery was built, but there were still houses, shops and inns on all sides of the church. Even today, along the High Street kerb edge, it is still possible to spot the metal sockets for shop awnings – look out for them! After 1891, some of these buildings were bought up and gradually demolished to open up the vista; the WWI Memorial, resembling a mediaeval preaching cross, now stands on the site of the Three Tuns, a three-gabled inn or public house which was pulled down on 9 November 1891.

In 1797, during the Spithead Mutiny against deplorable pay and conditions in the Fleet - described in the Independent in 1997 as ‘the first example in British history of a carefully planned and highly disciplined industrial action’ - legend has it that the seamen’s delegates held meetings in the Three Tuns Inn.  At this time, the country was at war with Revolutionary France.  Lord Howe and other officers were kept waiting on the stairs while the men conferred on the latest offer from the Admiralty. The confrontation ended when Admiral Howe ‘brought the mutineers to a sense of duty and obedience’, granting nearly all their demands which were considered justified. No-one was court-martialled. A hundred years later, the demolition of the Three Tuns in 1891 opened up the approach to the church from the High Street.

West of the Three Tuns stood the Red Lion Inn, where Samuel Pepys, Admiralty Official and diarist, recorded a stay in 1661. Between these two buildings emerged the southern end of Church Path, the narrow pedestrian lane connecting High Street and St. Thomas’s Street. This lane provided access to the classical West Door (now situated on the north side and clearly dated 1691 – you can also see the re-located gate posts there). Just before the major building programme to complete the west end of the cathedral - in the late 1980s and early ‘90s - an archaeological excavation revealed the yard, foundations and outhouses of the Red Lion Inn. This area, now the West Front, was cleared from 1930 onwards to make way for the new nave and eventually to create the vista familiar to us today.

The images of the Three Tuns are to be found at the late Tim Backhouse’s fascinating site History in Portsmouth, which explores the entire High Street as it was in the 1850s; to the left of the Three Tuns in the photo you can just see the very narrow entry to Church Lane/Path. The sketch shows how the grave-stones pressed right up to the building at that time.

http://historyinportsmouth.co.uk/opp/high-street-west/hs94-97.htm