Last modified: 9 November 2026 · Build 1
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See also: The Wheatsheaf · The County Arms · Trinity Fields
Working notes, not for publication as they stand. They summarise the in-progress Surrey Tavern page, which has the pictures and cuttings. Points still to be checked are marked [?].
On the corner of Trinity Road and Bellevue Road, where Burntwood Lane comes in from the west: the crossing at the middle of the Common. Opposite, across Trinity Road, is the field that is now Trinity Fields.
In the 19th century its address was 172 Trinity Road, not Bellevue Road. (Today 172 Trinity Road is Thomas Hardy’s old house, The Larches: the road was renumbered at some point [when?].)
Unlike the Wheatsheaf, the Surrey Tavern is a newcomer, built when the road and the district were first being developed. It was built about 1864 and licensed in 1865 [?].
The OS map surveyed in 1868–74 already shows it, along with the name “Trinity Road”, but not yet St Mary Magdalene or the Baptist chapel almost opposite.
The new landlord advertised boldly in the South London Press:
Then a real loss: in January 1870 a reward of five pounds was offered for a bay horse, nearly 16 hands high, lost on the night of 28 December 1869 “from a field opposite the Surrey Tavern” (Daily Telegraph, 22 January 1870).
The district was still largely rural. Customers came on horseback or with carts and carriages, so there would have been stables, and animals were evidently turned out into the field opposite.
That field, now Trinity Fields, has a long sporting history, and the Surrey Tavern played its part, for example as changing rooms. Graham Jackson’s A History of Trinity Fields (2021) covers this [summarise]. See also the Chronicles of December 2021 (a sports pub) and April 2022 (advertisements).
A favourite local story says that part of the pub was built from bricks salvaged when the Craig Telescope (the “Scope”) was dismantled in the 1860s. The Craig Telescope project published the theory, which would also explain why the 2003 “Big Dig” found so little demolition debris.
The 1923 photograph disproves it. The section in different brick was added in the early 2000s, when the building was enlarged to make flats. It was done so “authentically” that many people, including me, took it for 1860s work.
The Surrey Tavern closed as a pub around 2006. The building is now flats, with Brinkley’s Kitchen, a restaurant, on the ground floor.
A new pub for a new road, opened in the 1860s on the crossing in the middle of the Common: a stop for horses and sportsmen, photographed by moonlight in 1896, and the subject of a much-loved local myth about Craig’s telescope.