Qualla: White Lion Inn

White Lion Inn: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1768 a man named George Alexander Steevens, who was editing a new edition of Shakespeare's plays, came to Stratford-upon-Avon and stayed at the White Lion Inn on Henley Street. The landlord, John Payton, was a Shakespeare enthusiast with an idea. Stratford had just finished building a new Town Hall, but the corporation could not afford a statue for the empty niche on its north face. Payton proposed something more ambitious than commissioning a sculptor: persuade David Garrick -- the most famous actor in England -- to donate a statue and stage a festival. The corporation offered Garrick the freedom of the borough in a box made from the wood of Shakespeare's own mulberry tree. Garrick accepted. The result, in September 1769, was the three-day Shakespeare Jubilee that essentially invented modern literary tourism. It all started in the back parlour of a coaching inn.

Read more: White Lion Inn on Qualla

White Lion Inn: From Elizabethan House to Coaching Inn

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ori...

Read more: White Lion Inn on Qualla

White Lion Inn: The Garrick Jubilee Begins Here

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Septembe...

Read more: White Lion Inn on Qualla

White Lion Inn: An Inn of Soldiers and Smallpox

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 17...

Read more: White Lion Inn on Qualla

White Lion Inn: From Inn to Museum of the Strange

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 th...

Read more: White Lion Inn on Qualla

White Lion Inn: Writers Who Stayed Here

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 -...

Read more: White Lion Inn on Qualla