East Grinstead Club Vat

White Lion Hotel, 165 London Road, East Grinstead?

Blaster J. M. Presley.

East Grinstead Club Vat

Photo made available by onlinedatasearch.com

Blaster J. M. Presley may have been a relative of Blaster W. P. Presley who ran the White Lion Hotel Vat in East Grinstead. Vat meetings for The East Grinstead Club Vat may therefore also have been held at the White Lion Hotel.

The White Lion Hotel started out as an Inn in 1576. East Grinstead was a halfway point between London and the south coast and it used to be full of public houses. However over the years many pubs in the town including the White Lion have disappeared.

The White Lion was converted to a McDonald’s “Drive Thru” in 1997 (as shown in the above photo) despite much resistance from local residents who formed themselves into the East Grinstead Coalition Against the McDonald’s Plan. Support for their campaign came from across all spectrums of the community, with protests made on the streets, in council meetings, at a public forum, in schools, and in the columns and letter pages of the local newspapers. In the end, non-East Grinstead bureaucrats using pro-development planning laws ignored the views of the East Grinstead residents.