Historic Stowe pub reopens without the fleas, rats or mouldy walls

Visitors to the New Inn at Stowe gardens found much to complain about in the 18th century. Modern ones should notAt a cost of �9m the worst pub in Buckinghamshire is open again and ready to receive guests. However, the National Trust has not been entirely authentic in its restoration of the 18th-century New Inn at Stowe.The fires are burning again in the grates, the beer barrels are ready in the tap room and the sheets are hanging in the laundry, but the fleas, the rats, the filth, the wallpaper breathing arsenic fumes from walls mouldy with damp, the dreadful food and the even worse beds are gone.Lord Cobham built the New Inn in 1717 to feed and water visitors to the extraordinary front garden at his palatial home at Stowe: 250 acres studded with temples, columns, arches, obelisks, cascades, grottoes, and lakes.The lakes were a three-dimensional allegory of liberal politics, with the Temple of Modern Virtue a deliberately tottering ruin sheltering only a headless bust of Louis XIV, and the Temple of British Worthies glorifying a motley crew including Isaac Newton, Elizabeth I, John Locke and Walter Raleigh."It was, then as now, the most important landscape garden in Europe, designed as a riposte to Versailles," said Richard Wheeler, the National Trust garden historian."It was all intended to ensure that the attentive visitor would never in their future life even contemplate voting Tory ? though there is no evidence that this ever worked."Visitors flocked to a garden which Wheeler described as "a theme- park-style tourist attraction of its time".The inn, which also served as a pub for locals and estate workers, was built to cater for visitors who were well enough off to arrive by stage coach or post chaise and pay 6d for a guidebook without which they had no hope of making sense of the garden, but were not grand enough to be invited to stay in the house.Cobham leased his pub to various landlords. Complaints from early guests, traced by an archaeologist, Gary Marshall, were vituperative. One visitor said that none of his party had been able to sleep a wink from the "fleas and gnats". Another moaned about "bad beds and worse eating". Marshall has also established that the cellars regularly flooded disastrously: he began his own work in the building standing in a foot of foetid water.The complaints ended after the inn changed hands in the late 18th century and was considerably smartened up. By the end of the 19th century, when the gardens had bankrupted their owners and been stripped of many features, the New Inn had become a farm house.The National Trust began an epic restoration of the gardens 20 years ago, but with the big house now one of the grander public schools, it had to operate from a glorified garden shed.The trust bought the New Inn from the last private owners in 2005, when the roof was falling in, the floors had collapsed and the weed-choked yard was a graveyard of abandoned farm machinery.During the restoration, which was done with the help of a �1.5m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, volunteers cleaned and recycled 128,000 roof tiles, revealing some startling obscenities scrawled by Georgian workmen. A new barn-like building, replacing one beyond restoration, was built to house a shop and cafe.Admission to the restored historic rooms is free but, as in the 18th century, visitors can buy tickets to make their way down a farm track, ring a bell outside the Temple of Friendship and apply to walk the paths of virtue or vice.So far the only complaints have been about the queues for cream teas.The National TrustHeritageBuckinghamshireUnited KingdomMaev Kennedyguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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