Council blocks bid to convert Bishops's Castle pub into housing

My chief memory of the Boar's Head is watching England lose the 2007 rugby world cup final on its televisions.

But the Shropshire Star has up-to-date news. The council has refused a planning application that would see the building used for housing instead.

The story is complicated by the fact that the local police had to apologise after wrongly naming the landlord as a paedophile because they had confused him with another man who bears the same name, but this has to be good news for one of my favourite towns.

When I was a councillor on Harborough District Council we refused a similar request concerning the Crown in Theddingworth. I believe we may have been the second council to do such a thing,

Don't get too excited. The Crown closed years ago.

Theddingworth village hall

Theddingworth has a Norman church with significant monuments and a Congregational chapel from the early 19th century. But both were locked and the latter was impossible to photograph from the most desirable angle.

So instead here is the village hall. It did not make it into Pevsner, but the Victoria County History says:

John Smeeton, a Congregationalist ... built the Smeeton Institute nearby in 1893 as a memorial to his son, S. P. Smeeton (d. 1889). The institute is a single-storied building in the Tudor style and contains a reading room and a billiard room.

I don't suppose it does any more, but at least it is still open.

Theddingworth railway station

If you approached Theddingworth station along the gated road from Laughton and saw the station master's house, signal box and station building, you might fear being held up by a mixed freight or a stopping train to Rugby. But the station closed, along with the whole line from Stamford via Market Harborough to Rugby, in June 1966.

That station master's house is now a private residence and the people who live there obviously respect the site's history. The level crossing gates and signal box are well maintained and there is even a Theddingworth sign on the remaining platform - though it's a bugger to photograph without trespassing.