by Tony Mitchell

For centuries, inns provided sustenance and accommodation for travellers. The earliest of these were pilgrims, so the hostelries were found on routes to places such as Canterbury and Glastonbury. By the fourteenth century, there were people who needed to travel regularly, such as messengers, traders and packhorse men. More inns opened as a result, but the accommodation was basic and food was not normally available.

The fifteenth century saw a further increase in travel, and more inns. In the sixteenth century, Henry VIII wanted his communications delivered speedily and efficiently, and the postal service was improved. Post boys in uniform would travel on horseback on the post roads radiating out of London. It wasn’t a public service, the mail carried was official, but there was enough business for inns with stables attached to open. They offered the post boys accommodation and a change of horse, which was necessary every ten miles or so because the animals were ridden hard.

In 1643, Charles I established the first post office in London, and in 1660, Charles II established the general post office with its headquarters in St Martins-Le-Grand. Mail coaches, and a little later, passenger coaches departed from there. Stagecoaches were so named because they travelled in stages of up to 15 miles at a time. When coaches stopped to change horses, passengers wanted food, drink and perhaps an overnight stay. This led to the small inns that had serviced the post boys being extended, and new premises that offered more comfort.

New coaching inns sprang up in the towns that provided the main stops on routes leaving London. Until the mid1750s, when turnpike roads began to appear, the maximum distance a coach could travel in one day was between twenty five and thirty five miles. This determined the towns where bigger inns would be located.

Coaching inns were at their busiest during the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, when coach travel was at its peak. The most popular inns were full to capacity both day and night. New coach routes were being opened, and new premises were being built to accommodate them. Then, in the 1830s, the railways came, and the days of the coaching inns were numbered. Railways didn’t necessarily follow established routes. They went their own way, linking towns that were off coaching routes, and having no real presence in some towns where inns had previously thrived. Many inns closed, whilst others sort new types of customer in order to keep going.

In the sixteenth century, Uxbridge was recognised as the first stopping point on a traveller’s route to and from London. Many inns were built at about this time to cater for the increase in the transitory population. During the seventeenth century, Uxbridge’s fortunes fluctuated largely due to its dependence on the corn market and inns, both of which suffered when there were poor harvests or when plague struck, as it did in 1625, 1636 and 1665.

Throughout the eighteenth century the market and town prospered. Equally important was the coaching trade. At the end of the century up to forty stage coaches a day passed through the town, all stopping to change horses, plus all the private traffic. There were over fifty inns and alehouses to cater for this traffic and four breweries to supply them. The town was so congested that in 1785 the High Street was widened and improved. The Market House was demolished and rebuilt in 1789.

In the 1830s, over eighty stage coaches passed through Uxbridge each day. Most were drawn by several horses, and every inn had stables in which to accommodate them. The major inns in Uxbridge providing meals and a change of horses for travellers, as well as overnight accommodation, were the Crown, the George, the White Horse, the King’s Arms and the Crown & Treaty. Situated on the road to Oxford, Uxbridge was about midway between Tyburn (now Marble Arch) and High Wycombe. But by the end of the 19^th century, the railway had changed all this. The main line didn’t come through Uxbridge.

When it was built in the early sixteenth century, the building which became the Treaty House or Crown and Treaty was about two-thirds larger than it is now. During the eighteenth century, with the expansion of the coaching trade through Uxbridge, part of the house was demolished, and the road was rerouted through its garden. It then became a coaching inn with stabling for forty horses. But this trade ceased in the second half of the 19^th century.

As can be seen in its 1904 advertisement, the Crown & Treaty, shown as The Crown, Ye Olde Treaty House, was by then appealing to cyclists. The advertisement states ‘Headquarters for all Cyclists’, ‘Cycling parties and beanfeasts at special low rates’, and ‘All kinds of seasonable fruit for cyclists’.