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. The premises is known for its Grade II* listed entrance sign and its association with Royal Shrovetide Football.
]
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 his friend and older contemporary the English writer ...
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 owner worked with local architects, conservation group Brownhill Hayward Brown, Derbyshire County Council 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 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. It is tasked w ...
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.]
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.gallows
A gallows (or scaffold) is a frame or elevated beam, typically wooden, from which objects can be suspended (i.e., hung) or "weighed". Gallows were thus widely used to suspend public weighing scales for large and heavy objects such as sacks ...
-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 reference book published annually, listing world ...
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 police officers while under arrest in the United States on 25 May 2020. Immediately following his murder, protests and r ...
, a 28,000-signature petition called for it to be taken down, describing it at "disgusting racist imagery". Derbyshire Dales District Council 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 Royal Shrovetide Football match.
See also
*
* Listed buildings in Ashbourne, Derbyshire
References
Citations
Sources
*
External links
*
{{coord, 53.0172, N, 1.733016, W, display=title
Ashbourne, Derbyshire
Grade II* listed pubs in Derbyshire