Pub history

The Red Lion

For many years, the triangular plot in front of The Red Lion was the landlord’s garden. It was also a traffic bottleneck, ‘Bitterne Fork’, where the rural High Street (now Bitterne Road) was joined by a country lane (Bursledon Road). The V-shaped fork has long been replaced by a pedestrian precinct. The Red Lion remains, built in the 1860s, in front of an earlier pub of the same name. The original Red Lion, from the 1830s, was a coaching inn.