In 1802, a Methodist preacher visited an inn in Newquay and found the company rather trying.
Richard Treffry, the Methodist preacher rather than the industrialist Joseph Thomas Treffry, left a diary which, as reproduced in a modern local-history account, describes being entertained by Mr Carter at an inn in August. On a later visit he complained about people being drunk and quarrelsome.
Two centuries later, a preacher being disappointed by behaviour in a pub requires very little reconstruction.
That local-history account identifies Carter’s establishment with the Old Inn that became The Central. It gives us a much livelier way into the history than the date I originally went looking for.
I had expected to write about an old pub. The pub led me into the town which existed before the resort.
Business in the square
Central Square sits between Bank Street and Fore Street, surrounded by modern Newquay. The historic survey describes it as the heart of the older Towan settlement, with New Quay developing separately around the harbour. Fore Street linked the two.
They are parts of one continuous town now. The older distinction explains why a square a short distance from the harbour could have its own importance.
The survey records an Old Inn and trade in the square. Farmers brought grain, left wagons outside and conducted business inside. The pub supplied a room in which the surrounding economy could meet.
That is a more useful kind of antiquity than simply being old. There were goods to sell, people to find and transactions to agree. Presumably the drinking occasionally interfered with the arrangements. Treffry would not have been surprised.
Think about what bringing grain into town actually means. The wagons in the survey are doing more than providing a picturesque foreground. Someone has produced a crop, arranged its movement and come to a place where there are people to deal with. The business ends at a table, but it began well before anybody ordered a drink.
Today you can compare prices, arrange a collection and complain about the delivery from the same phone. A trading square puts those encounters in one physical place. That makes the inn useful even to somebody who has not set out with the express intention of getting drunk. Although, judging by the preacher’s response, the distinction could become less obvious as the visit progressed.
Picture the scene as an illustration, rather than a recovered Tuesday afternoon: wagons outside, a negotiation indoors, someone trying to locate a buyer while somebody else has become unusually certain that he knows the correct price of everything. The documented setting gives the scene its shape. Ordinary human behaviour supplies the reason it is so easy to imagine.
The date that would not cooperate
The familiar claim places an inn on the site in 1755, the year William Borlase visited Towan and New Quay.
It is an attractive connection. Borlase described the settlement, so it would be convenient if he also identified the inn. The passage traced in this research does not.
That leaves 1755 unproved as a date for the pub. It does not establish that there was no inn then; it means the description of the village cannot do the work of a lease or a licensing record.
The early-nineteenth-century diary account and the survey’s description of the trading square give us a firmer starting point. The history remains interesting without making Borlase stop for a drink he did not record.
Commercial, Central, and the town around it
Later records make the changing names easier to follow. A Kresen Kernow lease from 1890 names Philip Buckthought as hotel keeper at the Commercial Hotel, Newquay. A Cornish Memory photograph from 1926 identifies the Central Inn and describes its earlier names as the Central Hotel and the Commercial.
While those names changed, Newquay was changing around the site. Harbour trade, fishing and mineral traffic had expanded the working town. Passenger rail then connected it with a growing visitor market, and larger hotels appeared.
The Great Western’s opening in 1879 belongs to that later chapter, explored in The Hotel the Railway Built. The inn in the square belongs to an older geography of arrivals: people coming into the settlement to meet and trade.
The continuity is the useful thing. A place could remain central while what happened around it became almost unrecognisable.
Philip Buckthought is worth pausing over. A named hotel keeper in a lease turns an anonymous old establishment back into somebody’s business. He belongs to a town in which visitors and established local trade could encounter each other at the same counter.
For the customer, a hotel can be an escape from ordinary responsibilities. For the person running it, the building is a concentration of them. Rooms, drink, food and the expectation that it will all be available when wanted: the holiday begins because somebody else is working. That is as recognisable in Newquay now as the preacher’s disappointment.
The records do not require us to divide the town into respectable hotel guests and disreputable pub customers. Those are convenient characters for a story, but people do not always remain in their assigned departments. What we do have is an inn involved in trade, a visitor complaining about disorder and a later named hotel keeper. There is already a proper town in that small collection.
How old is an old pub?
The building, business, name and site need not have the same birthday.
The historic survey says the Old Inn was rebuilt as The Central. Local accounts place that rebuilding in 1859; the precise year remains less secure than the survey’s broader account of a rebuilt inn.
That is also why an “oldest pub” contest is less helpful than it sounds. One contender may have older walls; another, a longer history of serving customers on the same ground. Change the definition and the winner changes with it.
The Central has a better story available. An inn occupied a trading place in the old settlement, then continued through changes of name and building while the town grew around it.
The place stayed useful
I began with a date and ended with a square.
The square explains why the inn mattered: it was where people already came to do business. Before grand hotels began selling the view, the older settlement had its own reasons for bringing people together.
That makes the pub a marker of Newquay’s growth without asking every surviving wall to be as old as the story.
The Central does not need 1755 to hold the article together. Farmers outside with wagons, business inside, and a displeased preacher give us quite enough to begin with.
