Why did not some student of social changes record intimately the last lingering days of the “Chapel House” inn: why did no artist make a pictorial record of it for us? It decayed, just as, centuries earlier, the “Chapel” had done from which its name derived, stone by stone and brick by brick, and there was none to record, in literature or in art, the going of it. All we know is that it ceased in 1850 to be an inn, that the remains of the house long stood untenanted; that the dependent buildings became labourers’ cottages, and that the stables have utterly vanished.
“CHAPEL HOUSE” INN.
What is “Chapel House” to-day? You come along the lonely road, across the ridge of the downs, from Oxford, and find, just short of the cross-roads to Stratford-on-Avon and Birmingham, to Banbury or Cirencester, past where a milestone says “Oxford 18, Stratford-on-Avon 21, and Birmingham 43 miles,” a group of some ten stone-built cottages, five on either side of the road, with the remains of the inn itself on the right, partly screened from observation by modern shrubberies. A porticoed doorway is pointed out as the former entrance to the tap, and the present orchard in the rear is shown as the site of the greater part of the inn, once extending over that ground in an L-shape. The house is now in use as a kind of country boarding-house, where “paying-guests,” who come for the quiet and the keen, bracing air of these heights, are received.
For the quietude of the place! How cynical a reverse of fortune, that the busiest spot on the London, Oxford and Birmingham Road, where sixty coaches rolled by daily, and where innumerable post-chaises changed horses, should sink thus into slumber! The thought of such a change would, seventy years ago, have been inconceivable; just as unthinkable as that Clapham Junction of to-day should ever become a rural spot for picnics and the plucking of primroses.
A curious feature in the story of “Chapel House” inn is that a small portion of the house has in recent times been rebuilt, for the better accommodation of present visitors. In the course of putting in the foundations some relics of the old chapel were unearthed, in the shape of stone coffins, bones, a silver crucifix, and some beads.
When evening draws in and the last pallid light in the sky glints on the old casements of the wayside cottages of “Chapel House,” or in the dark avenue, the spot wears a solemn air, and seems to exhale Romance.
London inns retired from business are, as may be supposed, comparatively few. A curious example is to be found under the shadow of St. Alban, Holborn, in “White Hart” Yard, between Gray’s Inn Road and Brooke Street. It is the last fragment of an old galleried building, presumably once the “White Hart,” but now partly occupied by a dairyman and a maker of packing-cases. Local history is silent as to the story of the place.