Queen's Head Inn Yard, ca.1881

From: Henry Dixon & Son

RA Collection: Art

John Harvard, the founder of Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, owned the building for a short time in the seventeenth century. A plaque recording this, is to be found on the facade facing Borough High Street (now John Havard House). In the nineteenth century, as inns lost business to the railroads, many became depots for the railway companies and simple public houses. In the case of the Queen's Head, although part of the galleries had been let out to a hop merchant, the inn continued in business until 1895. Thereafter, it too, became a railway depot.