Grand View Hotel, Cleveland

The claim

A bayside hotel in Cleveland, on Brisbane's Redlands coast, that began around 1852 as Cleveland House. By 1862 it was trading as the Brighton Hotel, and about 1910 it took the name Grand View. The Queensland Heritage Register counts it among the state's oldest hotels still in use, and a multi-million-dollar makeover has refreshed its bars and dining.

What the records show

The Queensland Heritage Register's entry, number 600771, sets out the chain. Francis Edward Bigge, a grazier from Mt Brisbane Station and one of the men pressing for Cleveland Point to be made the port for Moreton Bay, bought the site in August 1851. The earliest section appears to have been up by 1852 and then to have stood empty for several years: it was a dwelling, not an inn, and the town knew it as Bigge's Folly. John Vincent Cassim, a boarding-house keeper from Kangaroo Point, leased it from 1855 to 1860, and in the middle of 1860 stabling, a coach-house, a store and a tap were built. By 1862 the publican William Rae held it as the Brighton Hotel, with a bathing-house, a jetty and a ten-tonne pleasure cutter. The publicans Andrew and Mary Goodall bought it in 1878, the family held it until 1936, the name Grand View dates from about 1910, and the two-storeyed form followed the railway reaching Cleveland. The register calls it one of the oldest hotels in Queensland in continuous use. PubTIC, weighing the claims to be Australia's oldest pub, gives 1851 for the build and says the house did not begin trading until 1855; the register shows that 1851 is the year Bigge bought the land, that what opened in 1855 was a boarding house, and that drink is recorded on the premises from 1860. The year the house claims is the year it was begun as a private dwelling, which is why the grade stays at B. The State Library of Queensland's index of licensed victuallers, published as open data by the Queensland government, transcribes the licence lists printed in the Queensland Government Gazette between July 1900 and July 1914, and it carries this house through those years. The Cleveland district's first list here, gazetted on 7 August 1900, names five licensees and records no hotel names at all; from the list gazetted on 29 January 1901 the houses are named, and L. H. Firth holds the Brighton beside the Cleveland, Capalaba, Redland Bay and Wellington Point houses. Firth keeps the Brighton to 1903, then Edward Cardigan Clarke has it in 1904 and 1905, Mary J. O'Brien in 1906, Annie Esther Fogarty in 1907, Thomas Olesen in 1908 and A. P. Radford in the list gazetted on 3 March 1909. No Brighton appears after that. A Grand View Hotel appears instead, under Harris Toub, in the list gazetted on 31 August 1909, while the district's other five houses go on unchanged, so the register's about 1910 for the change of name is a few months late and the new name is in the gazette by the end of August 1909. Toub holds the licence through the lists to 1912, and Hans Nielsen has it in those of 1912 and 1913, the last gazetted on 22 April 1913. One caution the index imposes on itself: it gives the licence district and not the street, and its coordinates are the district's, so the Brighton and the Grand View are tied to this house by the heritage register's account of a house that changed its name, and not by anything printed in the gazette.

Dated evidence for Grand View Hotel, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1851	Claimed founding	The press
c.1852	Present building	Building fabric
1860	First record of a drinking house here	Wikipedia

What to look for inside

Built as a house for Francis Edward Bigge and nicknamed Bigge's Folly
A boarding house from 1855, with a tap built in 1860
Traded as the Brighton Hotel by 1862
Renamed Grand View c. 1910
Miniature murals of local history behind the public bar, probably 1950s

Visiting

Grand View Hotel is in Cleveland, Australia, at 49 North Street, Cleveland QLD. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

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