Roar: Vintage at the Red Lion

We'll be there on Saturday March 31.

The Lion comes back to life?

How lovely! The Boy and I just wandered up the High Street and it looks like the lovely old Red Lion pub has been rescued. 

The Red Lion is a seventeenth century coaching inn, which was sadly crumbling into a state of disrepair, having survived many incarnations of various shades of repute. You can see what a splendid building it once was / could be again, and we were afraid it was going to disintegrate so badly that it could only be knocked down ...

But now it's sporting a huge banner, courtesy of the pub company Antic Ltd, who have taken it over. They list it on their website with a fantastic nineteenth century photo of the pub at the height of its glory:

via The Red Lion Leytonstone

This article on the Waltham Forest Guardian website shows the flavour of the reaction locally, both good and bad...

We look forward to it opening, both to see it saved, and because a decent local would be ace!

[http://thisbutterflymind.blogspot.com]

A rose by any other name ...

Leyton was first recorded in c.1050 as Lugetune, a name which derives from the river Lea (itself Celtic in origin, meaning "the sparkling river") and the Old English word 'tun', meaning farm. Leytonstone was first recorded as Leyton atte Stone, in 1370, indicating that the place is between Leyton and the High Stone, the boundary mark.

Fascinating!

And I love imagining the scrubby, down-at-heel high street with it's death chicken takeaways and pound shops as a sprawling medieval farm by a rushing river, perched between civilisation and the boundary of the wild ancient forest - although admittedly it's currently rather a stretch to imagine this shopping-trolley-strangled reach of the River Lea as "sparkling", perhaps the 2012 Olympics development will restore it to it's former glory.

Geekily, I have been reading up on local place names in this ace book ... total goldmine!