Public houses have been part of the Basildon area's social life for centuries. The oldest inns served travellers, farm workers and village communities; later pubs were deliberately built into the post-war New Town neighbourhoods as places where new residents could meet. These pages cover their origins, what they offered, the people they served and, where records survive, the bands and entertainers who appeared in them.
London Road, Vange
The Five Bells is the oldest surviving public house in Basildon. A building stood on the site in the seventeenth century and the Five Bells is first recorded by name as an alehouse in 1769, when William West was the landlord. It also appears on Chapman and André's 1777 map of Essex. Its position on the old London-to-Southend route made it a natural stopping place for travellers as well as a local drinking house for Vange residents.
For much of its history the pub would have centred on the traditional licensed trade of beer, ale, wines and spirits, while its later life developed much more strongly around food. An adjoining building was used as a blacksmith's forge, another reminder of the traffic that once passed this important roadside location. The pub survived the enormous road changes around Five Bells and today continues as a pub and restaurant. The building is Grade II listed.
Local recollections also show how closely the Five Bells was tied to everyday village life. One account remembers children gathering there to catch the school bus to Craylands Secondary School in the 1940s. It was therefore much more than somewhere to buy a drink: it was a familiar Vange landmark and meeting point.
High Road, Langdon Hills
The Crown Inn was built in 1856 at the summit of Crown Hill and later became known as the Crown Hotel. Its elevated roadside position made it a prominent stopping place in Langdon Hills. It was associated with the Ind Coope brewery and had a beer garden as well as a meadow on the opposite side of the road.
The meadow became the home ground of Langdon Hills cricket, with a pavilion for the team, showing how a Victorian public house could become part of the wider recreational life of a village. A function hall was added behind the pub in 1923. In later years the Crown developed into a food-led pub/restaurant, and the function hall disappeared during alterations in the 1990s.
The Crown also received a particularly notable visitor in May 1950 when Hugh Dalton, then Minister of Town and Country Planning, visited Basildon and stopped at the Crown as part of his tour of the developing New Town area.
High Road / Pitsea Broadway, Pitsea
Pitsea's connection with a Railway Hotel went back to the nineteenth century, following the arrival of the railway. The better-known later Railway Hotel opened in 1927. It was the first completed building in local businessman Harold George Howard's ambitious 'Vision of Pitsea'. Howard sold the land to brewers Ind Coope but wanted the new building to have a distinctive mock-Tudor appearance.
The Railway served both the established Pitsea community and people passing through the busy centre around the station, market and Broadway. Like many large inter-war pubs, its trade was based around licensed bars and the social role of a hotel/public house in a growing district. It became one of Pitsea's most recognisable buildings.
The pub eventually closed and was demolished in 2010 as part of the regeneration of Pitsea. The loss of the Railway removed a building that had dominated views of Pitsea Broadway for more than eighty years.
Dry Street, Langdon Hills
The Red Cow is believed to date from 1843. Details of its earliest years as a pub are limited, but by the early twentieth century it was operating as a beer shop and off-licence. In 1931 its licence was transferred and the building developed into a Post Office and general store.
Customers could buy everyday provisions and refreshments, including tea, while the premises continued to serve the scattered Langdon Hills community in a very different way from its original pub trade. It remained a shop for decades and is now a private house named Roma. The building is a useful example of how a rural drinking house could change function as the community around it changed.