The Preston Park Hotel was on the corner of Havelock Road and Lucerne Road, very much a local pub with a small off-licence, games room and bar billiards. The licensee was for over 30 years in the 1950’s 1960’s and 1970’s was George Pearn. It was said to be haunted by the ghost of a young girl who was murdered nearby and brought to the pub.
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Now the Preston Park Tavern. Gastro-pub.
And very good food it is too!
Great photograph, it hasn’t changed its facade at all. I am intrigued by the story of the murder. I wonder what kind of people stayed at the Hotel? I live on Lucerne Road and am very interested to find out more about the area.
As a child I used to live next door but one to this pub in the 1960s. We lived on the ground floor at 84 Havelock Road. I am sure that there used to be a red phone box outside the pub, I can remember walking past the pub and getting that lovely warm fuggy beer smell, pubs don’t smell like that nowadays. We moved from Brighton when I was 11 years old but I still have vivid memories and finally made it back for a visit this May after 42 years. Brighton never really leaves you.
My best friend from the Varndean sixth form, Nick Waller, who lived further down the hill in Havelock Road had the Preston Park as his local. We assured George we were both 18 which he readily believed thinking we were both “students” somewhere. George was invariably in his 30s publican outfit of shirt and waistcoat and by this time (early 70s ) wheezed a bit. I think his wife was called Lea and she was a bit more infirm than him, and usually in a shapeless dress of unknown age. Nick and I thought he was impossibly ancient but we loved the old pub atmosphere, the never – cleaned ceiling yellow from decades of fag smoke and a very solid wooden topped bar, but a front of old tongued and grooved hardboard, with on top a jar of arrowroot biscuits for dog owners. No food of course in those days but he did sometimes have crisps. Our drink, reflecting our relative poverty, was mild and bitter which George called ” a pint of wallop”. Bar billiards was available and Nick usually won. Those were very happy days, my first real local, and I was always made very welcome. Nick passed away a while back in Wales and I miss him and our times at George’s.
In the early seventies I drank both here, (in the snug), and at the Cleveland. George Pearn was very old-fashioned, but a true gent. His wife Lee sadly suffered badly with shingles and occasionally used to have to take herself off to a darkened room. This pub and it’s tenants taught me, as a callow teenager, a great deal about behaving as an adult in social situations and especially why mixing scotch and brandy on the same heavy night out is a bad idea!
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