SNN112249 - Historic Building Recording: The Sun, Moon & Stars, 64 High Street, Blisworth

In July 2019 a programme of historic building recording was undertaken at the former ‘Sun, Moon & Stars’ public house in the High Street, Blisworth. The work was undertaken as the first stage of a planning condition relating to the conversion of the building to apartments, which required recording to HE Level 2/3 (a second stage, comprising a watching brief on groundworks for new houses on the site, will be reported separately). The present inn was built in 1797 by John Linnett, on the ruins of ‘The Chequers’, an earlier stone-built inn, elements of which survive in the present building. Linnett’s new inn was called the ‘Half Moon’. In 1822, the inn was purchased by Pickering Phipps, becoming part of the Phipps & Co tied house estate. During the mid to late 19th century, the inn became known as the ‘Sun, Moon & Seven Stars’ as a result of its association with the Manchester Oddfellows Society, whose logo includes those items: this became shortened to the ‘Sun, Moon & Stars’, though locally the original name ‘Half Moon’ was still used. The building remained an inn until the 1960s, when Phipps & Co became part of the Watney Mann brewing empire, and the inn was sold and delicensed. Since then it has housed an Arts & Crafts gallery, a café and a licensed restaurant, the latter closing in 1988 when the outbuilding containing the restaurant kitchens was demolished by a runaway lorry. At this time the building was listed Grade II, but during the following decade it deteriorated and was eventually compulsorily purchased by South Northants Council in c.2004. The ‘Sun, Moon & Stars’ is comprised of two ranges of two and three storeys respectively, each with a cellar, in an L-shaped plan. The building is largely constructed of brick, with some sections of the three storey wing in stone, presumably the remains of the previous inn on the site. While some of the layout of the ground floor of the inn can be determined, the fact that the building ceased to be an inn over half a century ago makes interpretation of room functions difficult. Interpretation of the building is further hindered by some of the less-than-sensitive alterations carried out by past owners, such as the stone ‘cladding’ of cellar C3, the removal of the floor above and the conversion of the second floor as accommodation for the landlord. Some repairs evidently made since the late 1980s have also been less than sympathetic, such as the use of modern block walling in rooms G1, F2 and F3.