What happened
The Red Lion stood on Canterbury Road in Wingham and is put forward as one of the oldest pubs in Kent on a thirteenth-century date. The Dover Kent Archives, which hold the licensing records for this part of the county, start their account in 1740 with James Powell and carry the licensees forward from there without a break: Beale, dead in 1802 leaving six small children; Thomas White from 1828; a widow, Elizabeth Andrews, keeping the house at seventy in 1881. Land was auctioned in its rooms in 1804. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it belonged to Gardner’s Ash Brewery a few miles up the road, and its sign still advertised Gardner’s ales after that brewery closed in 1954. The end came quickly. Punch sold the pub in October 2014 to a developer, who applied to turn it into six flats; the application was withdrawn, the village had it registered as an Asset of Community Value in May 2015, and in January 2016 the Dover Express reported that Paul Hollywood and the actor Neil Stuke had joined the campaign to reopen it.
What is there now
Shut, and still standing. The conversion to flats was not carried through and the Asset of Community Value registration gives the village first refusal if it comes up for sale, but no reopening has been reported since the 2016 campaign. Nothing in the archive’s record supports the thirteenth century; what it supports is an inn on this road from 1740.
Sources
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