Chelmsford’s Ghost Pubs – The Black Boy Inn

This month has us truly Lost Inn Time as we head way back four and a half centuries to the junction of High Street and Springfield Road. Here stands a hostelry with medieval heritage, on a site previously owned by the influential De Vere family. There’s even an uncorroborated tale that, one day, King Richard III while being entertained in Chelmsford went missing from among the De Vere’s party. Search parties were dispatched due to concern as to the fate of the meandering misunderstood monarch, and it was only after hours of searching that he was found enjoying a drink among his countrymen at the hostelry that would one day become the Black Boy Inn. The next search for him, of course, took about 530 years and famously found him buried beneath a car park in Leicester.

The premises were subsequently developed into a working Inn, initially called The Crown, The New Inn, but by the 1630s as The Black Boy.    

By 1642, The Black Boy had become a major coaching inn, strategically positioned on the London - Colchester - Harwich route.  As a busy transport hub, it offered accommodation, meals, stabling for horses, and even acted as a post office from 1673, with mail-coach services departing twice daily, protected by a guard. 

In the early 18th century, the inn functioned as a temporary detention centre for individuals suspected of disloyalty to King George I, and during hostilities with France, it housed a surge of military personnel—some even slept in stables due to overcrowding. 

Notable visitors included the Duke of Wellington - who changed horses there in 1832 -and Charles Dickens, who stayed while working as a reporter and, looking out from his window, uttered his now infamous slight upon Chelmsford, describing it as “the dullest and most stupid spot on the face of the earth.” 

The arrival of the railway in 1843 drastically reduced coach traffic, and hence the inn’s business. In 1857, the inn was sold and demolished, leaving an empty gap on High Street for more than a decade. By 1868, the gap had been filled by Barnard’s Temperance Hotel, aligned with the 19th-century movement promoting sobriety. 

In the early 1920s, the site was sold again and became a branch of Boots the Chemists.  

Today, the location – 38 High Street - is occupied by a branch of Metro Bank. Above the entrance, a blue plaque memorialises the inn, noting its historical significance.

The Black Boy Inn was far more than a coaching inn – on its corner plot, it truly justifies its status as a cornerstone of Chelmsford’s social, political, literary and transport life for over three centuries.