The Ivy House

For many years The Ivy House was called The Newlands Tavern, fleetingly becoming The Stuart Arms in the 1980s and 1990s, before receiving its current name. For about 90 years the pub was in the hands of only two families. The 1871 census lists a Thomas Dickason - Beer House Keeper, Newlands Tavern - the first of four Dickasons to run the place. The... family's association with the pub came to an end in the early 1920s when it was taken over by Edgar Rhodes. After his death in 1941, his wife Elizabeth ran the pub until 1958. At some time during the Rhodes's tenure the pub was rebuilt. A Victorian photograph of the first tavern (right) shows a long two storey building; nevertheless brewery archives record that the pub in the 1920s was selling an impressive 800 brewer's barrels of beer per annum - over 600 pints a day! The exact date of the current building is uncertain, but may have been at the point when Edgar Rhodes's original lease with the brewery expired in 1936. The architect may have been A.E. Sewell, Truman's prolific in-house architect. The Ivy House owes its rather lonely situation at the brow of Stuart Road's slight hill to a German V1 bomb that crashed into the adjoining row of shops, in the afternoon of July 1st 1944, killing seventeen people. All the shops were destroyed or damaged beyond repair. When the war ended the celebration party was held in the pub, the surviving physical heart of the community. Long-standing local residents tell us that music and dance was often on the agenda throughout the 1950s and 1960s; however, it wasn't until 1972 that the Newlands really took off as a music venue, when the brewery offered a lease to Reg and Sue Fentiman, a young music-loving couple, with the proviso that use the backroom and stage in the same way that other pubs were doing in north London - this was the fledging pub-rock movement that paved the way for punk. The Fentimans dived into their task with relish. By the time they left in 1976, the pub had played host to such notables as Elvis Costello, Joe ...Read More