The temperance movement of the 19th and 20th centuries found many followers who were so convinced of the evils of alcohol that they gave it up completely, often swearing an oath or ‘signing the pledge’ to steer clear of the demon drink. It was a movement not without controversy (both pub landlords and barmaids protested loudly), but it produced many buildings, such as billiards rooms, cafés, and hotels, designed to provide entertainment or hospitality without alcohol. Few of these could have been be as grand as the Ossington Coffee Tavern in Newark. Its name comes from its founder, Lady Charlotte Ossington, who gave around £16,500 of her money to buy the site and erect the building, employing the architects Ernest George and Harold Peto to design it. Much more than a restaurant, this building of 1882 contained, in addition to the ‘general coffee room’ and kitchen, assembly rooms, a reading room and library, a club room, a billiard room, accommodation for travellers, and stabling for horses. There was also a garden where, in summer, customers could listen to music – a facility that was compared to a German beer garden, but without so much as a sniff of beer or any other alcoholic drink.
George and Peto were a fashionable firm of London architects. The mix of materials they employed, and the assortment of dormer gables, oriel windows, tall brick chimneys and elliptical arches suggest an eclectic range of styles – parts of it evokes Tudor revival, other details, such as the glazing pattern in the windows, brings to mind the early Stuart period. The official listing description calls it ‘Vernacular Revival’, others call its style ‘free old English’. The building certainly has some of the asymmetry of the vernacular, garnished with the timber-framing that is associated with ‘old English’. The mixture of sources, forms and materials is handled with flair.
There’s also quite elaborate plasterwork decoration outside, although much of the original interior decoration, which featured carved wood, panelled dados, and fine plasterwork, does not survive. Both the high level of decoration and the grand architecture suggest that both Lady Charlotte and her architects wanted to emulate the flashy exuberance of contemporary pubs, with their tiled walls and bar fronts, etched and mirror glass, rich woodwork, and so on. In one nickname of the building, the Ossington Coffee Palace, we can perhaps hear echoes of the phrase ‘gin palace’.
The Coffee Tavern was aimed particularly at farmers and traders who came to Newark on market days, as well as other customers who were visiting the town or who lived nearby. However, this potentially large customer base did not fulfil its potential. It seems that the temperance hostelries that were most successful were those that did not try to imitate pubs but presented themselves as cafés pure and simple. A ‘dry pub’, on the other hand, reminded many customers that what they wanted was a real pub, complete with beer pumps or gin bottles. In any case, the temperance movement slowly declined in the early-20th century and the temperance venues that did not vanish completely became more conventional hotels, cafés or restaurants. After a few years serving the temperance cause, the Ossington Coffee Tavern became a regular hotel and is now a café and bistro.
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