The Old Swan, Abbot Street, Wrexham
This building is thought to date from the 16th or 17th century and was probably a house originally. It was extended at the front and back in later centuries.
Notice the name “Old Swan Brewery” on the frontage. In the 19th century, the inn brewed its own beer – described in 1887 as having a “wide and surpassing reputation for excellence”. For most of that century, the inn was kept by members of the Lovatt family. They included Richard Lovatt, who died in 1852. He was Wrexham’s parish clerk for 24 years.
His son Edward succeeded him as parish clerk and Old Swan landlord. Edward was also an auctioneer and the local agent for the Allan Line of steamships, Tipper’s Cattle Food, Provincial Insurance and the Wrexham Tent Company. He may have suffered occasional cashflow problems: in 1879 he was fined for selling beer and gin without a licence after asking the Excise authorities for extra time to raise the money to renew his licence.
Edward had earlier been Liverpool’s deputy registrar of births and deaths, and a Quartermaster in the Denbighshire Hussars. Dinners at the Old Swan in his time were legendary. At the St David’s Day dinner in 1855, 60 to 70 guests enjoyed all the season’s delicacies and some things that weren’t in season, and Edward sang Glan Meddwl Mwyn.
Edward suffered worsening eyesight. He died, aged 62, in 1887 after an operation in Liverpool to replace one eyeball with a glass eye went wrong. An obituary poem dwelled on Old Swan dinners:
No man like thee could spread a feast,
Or share it with a keener zest,
Or more enjoy it, host or guest,
Or speed the song or cheer the jest.
In the first months of 1892, a soup kitchen in the Old Swan yard fed the “aged and deserving poor” and others who were suffering stress from the severe weather. When the Old Swan was auctioned later that year, it had “a good brewhouse on the premises” and a large club room.
Postcode: LL11 1TA View Location Map
Website of the Old Swan (Facebook)