The Eradication of Bar House

by David Wilson

The recent demolition of the Admiral Nelson public house on Bar Road saw the removal of the last tangible reminder, apart from Bar Road itself, of The Bar, otherwise known as Arwenack Bar. This was a large natural sand and shingle bank enclosing an area of tidal pools, artificially embanked in the seventeenth century to support the operation of corn mills powered by the tide. Subsequently shipyards were developed on the bank and around the edge of the seaward pool known as Bar Creek. For 150 years or more a number of shipbuilding firms built and repaired a great variety of vessels here; including packet ships, merchant vessels from barques to smacks, pilot cutters and quay punts, steam tugs and pleasure yachts. From the 1920s the pools were gradually filled in with spoil from the expansion of Falmouth Docks; the last of the shipwrights moved away to Ponsharden and Little Falmouth. The whole area has, of course, now been built over, to form the Port Pendennis marina complex, the Events Square, and the Maritime Museum.

The Symons family shipyard was one of several sited on the side of the creek, with its landward entrance off Bar Road. The family residence adjoined the yard on the edge of the foreshore, and was known as Bar House. In the early nineteenth century, apart from the sound of hammering and sawing, and the smell of sawn timber, the creek was still relatively unspoilt. With the expansion and increasing affluence of Falmouth, in 1831 shipwright Francis Symons decided to try to cash in on the new craze of bathing. Where better to establish sea-water based health cure facilities and lodgings than at his own Bar House? The following notice was one of a number Symons placed in the Royal Cornwall Gazette to advertise his secondary business. How successful it was is not known. He continued ship building until about 1860, when his son George took over. W.H. Lean is believed to have been the next occupant of the site, until driven out by the Falmouth dock expansion. Meanwhile Symons Bar House had become the Dock Inn, later renamed and redeveloped as the Dock and Railway Hotel, and then the Riviera Hotel. After the second world war it reverted to the name of Dock and Railway Hotel. It subsequently became the Admiral Nelson.