The Mount

The story, as a local newspaper told it, was too good to leave alone. Before the war the Mount on Kings Road was a private house, owned by a German family who were “impounded” for the duration of hostilities. Later Mitchells & Butlers bought the site and turned it into licensed premises, and locals “with a tongue-in-cheek sense of history”, the paper said, renamed it “The Spies Pub”.

The cutting, given to Kingstanding Together by an Oscott resident, tells it as “the story goes”, and we have found nothing yet to confirm it. Its photograph does show what the old pub looked like: a large red-brick house with bay windows, up a flight of steps above the road.

Up the steps

Those steps are what people remember. “You had to go up loads of steps to it,” Marilyn Grimmett wrote on Voices of Kingstanding. Both her parents worked behind the bar, and she sat on a stool in the outdoor while her mother served, “as i used to get free packets of crisps and bottles of pop to keep me quiet”. She thought the landlords were Mr and Mrs Finch. The newspaper says regulars knew the place as “The Mat”.

Not everyone agrees on what came before. Ron Dawson, who grew up in Parkeston Crescent, remembered that “before the Mount became a Pub it was a Coal Yard”, though he added that he “wouldn’t bet a lot of money” on the name of it.

The crescent’s local

The Mount was the local for the crescents behind Kings Road. Alf Harvey, the window cleaner from Parkeston Crescent, was a regular for many years. When a neighbour printed out the comments about him in 2017, he read every one; he was, the reply on his behalf said, “pleased that so many people remember him fondly.” Tony T, from Parkeston, spent “much of my drinking days in the Mount”.

Rebuilt in 1989

In 1989 the old house was demolished and a low new pub built in its place, still called the Mount. Graham Curley drank in the old one for a few years: “when they pulled it down & rebuilt, it was never the same.” Marie Hill, who grew up in Parkeston Crescent, later ran it herself: “some good times at the Mount some hard times too.”

The pub still trades at 136 Kings Road as the Mount Tavern, now an Indian grill and steakhouse. Whether or not a German family ever lived on that bank, the nickname has outlived the house.