Volume Eleven - Pre-Victorian to the Present Day - some more aspects - A House of Character - The Red House Inn . . .

A House of Character

Few pubs survive for any great period without changing with the times. They may bow to brewery policy on mass "upgrading" and standardisation, or they may merely cease to fulfil their function with any efficiency, or trade may have drifted away, or there may be health or human factors involved. For basically one of the latter reasons the first changes are soon to take place at a wonderful and distinguished house that has otherwise remained undisturbed for decades.

This is the Red House , or Penarth Railway Hotel as its sign currently announces, an isolated pub at the end of what is now merely an industrial railway line to the oil depot that occupies the peninsula between Penarth mud-flats, facing Cardiff, and the Ely tidal harbour, facing Penarth. It is reached by Harbour road, the seaward extension to Ferry Road at the southern tip of Grangetown, Cardiff.

The name of the pub is only one of many idiosyncrasies, with the old nickname now the official title and used in correspondence by the brewery, whilst neither does the new name appear on its walls, nor are any of those walls red, or even the least bit pinkish. It has also been regularly confused with the Railway in Penarth. But all that should be put right in a few months' time when imminent improvements are complete.

The idiosyncrasies begin with the terms of the house's actual existence, Built originally on the property of the Penarth Railway Company, the house is now let by British Rail to Welsh Brewers (formerly to William Hancock) who in turn let it to its long-standing tenant, Ashley Young.