The Green Man & Black's Head Royal Hotel (sometimes simply the Green Man) is a public house and hotel on St John Street (the A515) in the town centre of

Ashbourne, Derbyshire Ashbourne is a market town in the Derbyshire Dales district in Derbyshire, England. Its population was measured at 8,377 in the 2011 census and was estimated to have grown to 9,163 by 2019. It has many historical buildings and independent sho ...

. The premises is known for its

Grade II* listed In the United Kingdom, a listed building is a structure of particular architectural or historic interest deserving of special protection. Such buildings are placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, H ...

entrance sign and its association with

Royal Shrovetide Football The Royal Shrovetide Football Match is a "medieval football" game played annually on Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday in the town of Ashbourne in Derbyshire, England. Shrovetide ball games have been played in England since at least the 12th ce ...

History

There has been a pub in this location since the 1750s.

James Boswell James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck (; 29 October 1740 ( N.S.) – 19 May 1795), was a Scottish biographer, diarist, and lawyer, born in Edinburgh. He is best known for his biography of the English writer Samuel Johnson, '' Life of Samuel ...

wrote that he stopped there to eat in 1777 (terming it "a very good inn" and its proprietress "a mighty civil gentlewoman") and Princess Victoria visited in the 1830s. The pub closed in 2012 following a period of decline. The owner worked with local architects, conservation group Brownhill Hayward Brown,

Derbyshire County Council Derbyshire County Council is the upper-tier local authority for the non-metropolitan county of Derbyshire in England. The non-metropolitan county is smaller than the ceremonial county, which additionally includes Derby. The county council is ba ...

and

Historic England Historic England (officially the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England) is an executive non-departmental public body of the British Government sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It is tasked with prot ...

to produce a suitable refurbishment plan that would be a sustainable business model while still preserving the building's historic character. It reopened to customers in 2018. It has since been praised for helping to revitalise the town's economy.

Architecture

The sign over the road adjacent to the pub was constructed in 1825 when the Green Man and Blackmoor Inn were joined together. There are two pictures on either side of the sign depicting a man dressed in green tweeds and wearing a green hat. On one side, the man is carrying a gun; on the other he is shooting wildfowl. The sign was Grade II listed in 1951, and updated to Grade II* in 1974. The

gallows A gallows (or less precisely scaffold) is a frame or elevated beam, typically wooden, from which objects can be suspended or "weighed". Gallows were thus widely used to suspend public weighing scales for large and heavy objects such as sa ...

-type sign is mentioned in the

Guinness World Records ''Guinness World Records'', known from its inception in 1955 until 1999 as ''The Guinness Book of Records'' and in previous United States editions as ''The Guinness Book of World Records'', is a British reference book published annually, list ...

as being the longest inn sign in the world. It was damaged by a lorry strike in 2006, but subsequently repaired. The sign features an effigy of a black man's head. In June 2020, during the

George Floyd protests in the United Kingdom Protests were held across the United Kingdom following the murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man, by a police officer in the United States on 25 May 2020. Immediately following his murder, protests and riots occurred in d ...

, a 28,000-signature petition called for it to be taken down, describing it at "disgusting racist imagery".

Derbyshire Dales District Council Derbyshire Dales ( ) is a local government district in Derbyshire, England. The district was created in 1974 as West Derbyshire; the name was changed to Derbyshire Dales in 1987. The council is based in the town of Matlock, and the district also ...

said it would remove the head as soon as possible, but locals removed it the same day, saying they had done so to protect it from vandalism, adding it would be restored with "a lick of black paint" and reinstalled at a later date. The Council, however, decided against replacing the controversial head, and its future currently remains undecided.

Sport

The Green Man is well known locally for being a focal point of the annual

match. A roll of honour, listing throwers and scorers since the late 19th century, is displayed inside the hotel. The pub sign has also been used as the finishing line for a soap box race in the town.

References

Citations Sources *

External links

* {{coord, 53.0172, N, 1.733016, W, display=title Ashbourne, Derbyshire Grade II* listed pubs in Derbyshire

History

Architecture

Sport

See also

References

External links