The Mug House stands on Severnside North, facing the water, which is the whole point of it. When Bewdley was one of the busiest inland ports in the country, this was a pub for the people who worked the river, and its name, its trade and its stories all come from that.
The name
A mug house was a common seventeenth century term for an alehouse, and it means what it sounds like. But there is a more particular local sense attached to this one. Traders and bow hauliers are said to have settled their business here over a mug of ale, a practice known as “muggin”, and the pub was where you came if you needed something arranged on the river.
Bow hauliers were the men who dragged boats upstream against the current, on foot, on the bank, before horses took the work over. It was among the hardest paid labour on the Severn. If your trow needed pulling up to Bewdley, the Mug House is where you went to find the gang who would do it. That account comes from local memory rather than from a document, but it is told consistently and it fits the geography exactly.
A town of seventy-one pubs
By 1841 old Bewdley recorded seventy-one public houses, which gave the town one of the highest concentrations of licences per head in the country. Welch Gate alone had ten in a hundred-metre stretch. In that context the Mug House was not unusual for existing. It was one of dozens, competing for the trade of a working river port, and it is notable now largely because it is still here and most of them are not.
Worth saying plainly, because it confuses people: there was a second Mug House in Bewdley, at No. 17 Welch Gate. It was a different pub entirely, it closed long ago and the building is a private house now. The river stories belong to this one.
The landlords
The first recorded landlord was John Smith, who ran the tavern through the 1820s. In 1836 he reduced the pub to a beerhouse, which sounds like a demotion and was in fact a shrewd piece of business: the Beerhouse Act had made it far cheaper to sell beer alone than to hold a full licence, and Smith was cutting his overheads.
Benjamin Smith took over as licensee in 1849, and in 1860 the pub passed to Henry Southern, a lantern maker by trade. On the brewery side, the Mug House joined the Worcestershire Brewing, Malting Company Ltd in 1846 and later came under the Kidderminster Brewery.
Still here
The riverside the Mug House looks out on has changed beyond recognition. The trows have gone, the warehouses are houses, the quay is a walk, and the flood defences that now run along Severnside were finished in the lifetime of anyone reading this. The pub has outlasted the trade that made it.
It also still does what it always did, which is host things. In April 2024, when a delegation from the Association du Souvenir des Cadets de la France Libre came to Bewdley for the eightieth anniversary of the Free French cadets at Ribbesford, the town took them to lunch at the Mug House.