The White Lion appears in Stratford records as early as 1591 -- an Elizabethan inn of modest size at numbers 16, 17, and 18 Henley Street, in a street whose other landmarks included a glover's house where John Shakespeare lived with his children. By the eighteenth century the original building was tired and outdated. In 1753 John Payton -- the same Payton who would later launch the Jubilee -- demolished the Elizabethan structure and rebuilt the inn at vastly enlarged scale. The work was completed that year by the Birmingham builder James Collins, producing what contemporaries described as one of the largest inns on the Holyhead Road. In its heyday the White Lion was said to offer 'a bill of fare equal to that of the Piazza Coffee House' in London -- which was high praise. In 1785 members of the household of Louis XVI stayed here. In 1806 the Prince Regent, the future George IV, occupied specially prepared apartments.

Payton's idea, hatched in conversation with Steevens at the White Lion, became England's first major literary festival. Garrick agreed to come. He commissioned a temporary wooden rotunda by the Avon, designed processions and pageants, set everything for the first week of September 1769. The town filled with visitors, the rotunda filled with poetry recitations, and the Avon promptly burst its banks. Two days of torrential rain destroyed the rotunda and turned the festival into a sodden farce. But the publicity was enormous. The Jubilee made Stratford permanently famous as a destination -- not just for Shakespeare scholars, but for ordinary tourists curious about the man whose plays were just beginning their long ascent toward national-poet status. The statue of Shakespeare that Garrick presented now stands in the niche it was designed for, in front of what is now Stratford Town Hall.

The White Lion's history runs through some of the more uncomfortable corners of English social history. During the English Civil War, the building was occupied by Parliamentarian soldiers -- one of countless coaching inns commandeered by both sides for billeting and supply. In 1765 a smallpox census of Stratford recorded thirty-nine people living at the inn at the time of the survey; remarkably, only two of them had not yet had the disease. The statistic captures both how routine smallpox was in eighteenth-century England, and how densely an inn like the White Lion was populated -- staff, lodgers, families, all crowded into the building's many rooms. John Payton the younger sold the inn to Thomas Arkell in 1823, and its great days as a coaching house ended with the railway era. The remaining portions of the building were added to the English Heritage list of protected buildings in 1994.

Today most of the original inn has been converted to residential and small commercial use. At number 21 Henley Street, in the surviving Elizabethan section, sits the privately operated Witchcraft and Wizardology Museum -- a personal collection accumulated over forty years that the owner describes as a fair-and-balanced examination of witchcraft, wizardology, and ritual from pre-Christian times to the present. The exhibits, the owner says, are intentionally tactile -- visitors can touch many of the objects, an approach he contrasts with the 'everything behind glass' model of conventional museums. Subjects include the Knights Templar, ritual sacrifice, and the various continental witch-trial traditions. The building is also marketed as one of the most haunted in England, frequently visited by paranormal investigators and ghost hunters. Whether or not one accepts those claims, the 1591 timbers and small leaded windows do feel like the kind of place a sixteenth-century cunning-woman might have recognised.

The White Lion makes appearances in literature both expected and unexpected. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the American author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, mentioned the inn in her travel writing about England. The English actor Rupert Graves -- not to be confused with the poet Robert Graves -- referenced it in his own work. There is no plaque marking the spot where Payton and Steevens hatched the Jubilee in 1768. The corner of Henley Street where it stood is now occupied by a mix of small shops and houses. Tourists pass it constantly on their way between Shakespeare's Birthplace and the Shakespeare Centre, almost none of them aware that one of the most consequential conversations in the history of English literary tourism happened a few feet behind the brick.