Written by Peter Wilmoth.

The Hampstead Hotel, at times known as The Hampstead Inn, is one of the oldest hotels in South Australia and a Prospect landmark.

It opened in 1854 on the north-eastern side of Prospect, run by its first licensee John Cox Junior in 1854 and again between 1860 and 1875. It was licensed as the Hampstead Hotel, but operated under the name Hampshire House Inn under licensee James G Witt.

By 1872 Cox held nearly 13 acres with the hotel. According to a 1996 Prospect Heritage Survey it appears that the hotel underwent extensive alteration in the 1930s to 1940s.

Two other licensees – W.S. Olifent and J. Lewis – had the pub for brief periods in between. As Max Lamshed notes in his book ‘Prospect 1872-1972, A Portrait of a City’, when John Cox ran the pub in 1858 he was both occupier and owner of the four acres on which it stood. By 1872, he had increased the holding to 13 acres and, says Lamshed, was more a farmer than an innkeeper.

The pub has had various names over its life. It was briefly known as the Coach-House Tavern and from 1869 it was known as the Hampshire Hotel. It was licensed as the Hampstead Hotel but operated as the Hampshire House Inn under licensee James G Witt. Many years later it was called the Basheer’s Hempstead Hotel for a short while between 1983-1986 before reverting to the Hampstead Hotel.

The original building was replaced in 1911 by an equally small hotel of the same name. Designed by F. Kenneth Milne, it was constructed for FJ Blades and W Chambers, formerly of the Green Dragon Brewery on South Terrace. It was popularly known as “the smallest pub in Adelaide”.

A 1996 Prospect Heritage survey noted the pub was a single-storey building constructed of brick with a cantilever verandah running along its main facade. “Some of its architectural elements are of importance in discerning design trends in the 1930s-40s. It displays aesthetic merit, design characteristics or construction techniques of significance to the local area.”

Noting the pub’s heritage value the Survey described it as a “Prospect landmark”. “The Hotel Hampstead has served generations of travellers and has been a community centre,” it said.

Like many pubs in settlement areas after the gold rushes in the mid-1800s, The Hampstead Hotel played an important part in the lives of local residents. It was far enough away from Adelaide in those days for Prospect to feel like it was growing as a separate community. The pub served as a meeting place, a place to eat and drink, and as a community hub for socialising and support. With the town finding its feet in its early years this was crucial.

Its importance in this new community was to become an even greater. Thirteen years before The Hampstead Hotel opened the area around Prospect was small. As the 1996 Prospect Heritage Survey noted, the 1841 census showed 109 people – 24 families – lived in the district.

“These people were trying to grow a few acres of potatoes, wheat or barley, run a handful of sheep, pigs or cattle, and create garden plots. Some of them, towards Hampstead, sank wells in attempt to gain the essential water. Growth did not occur without much effort.”

By the 1850s, the Survey said, a number of villages had been subdivided in the district and people were beginning to build. New suburbs were born, among them St John’s Wood, Sleaford, Duttonton, Islington, Beresford, Nailsworth and Prospect Village.

Parts of the district straddled important transport corridors, including the main roads to the north and north-east of Adelaide. More people were heading to the Prospect area, and the town’s pubs became even more important. “The mobility of people and goods created business and development in the Prospect district,” the heritage survey noted.

“Hotels, a few shops, houses and other service industries developed around transport routes. The Windmill Hotel, Hotel Hampstead and other hostelries, were created during this period.”

The Prospect Heritage Survey remarked on the rapid growth of the Prospect area after the years of settlement and 10 or so years after The Hampstead Hotel was opened. By 1870, some of the problems, such as lack of water and inadequate transport corridors directly from Adelaide through the district, were being or had been solved. “Over the next three decades a development-urge gripped the district, its land and its people,” the Survey noted.

“These were the years of unparalleled change, when the face of today’s Prospect was formed. Parcels of land were subdivided into estates, suburbs and townships and builders erected large numbers of dwellings, some suited to individual tastes, others all to the same pre-selected design. In general Australian and South Australian terms, these years of the late-Victorian era were times of rapid development.”

The Hampstead Hotel was sometimes the venue for discussion for this progress. In March 1870 the South Australian Chronicle reported that “a meeting of the electors of Yatala was held at the Hotel Hampshire. There was not a very large attendance.”

But by 1911 the community spirit had been boosted by potential growth through an extension to the tram line. In June The Register of Adelaide reported that “a meeting was recently held at the Hampstead Hotel in regard to the desired extension of electric cars to Hampstead. A sub committee was appointed to further the proposal, which is endorsed by many people in this beautiful suburban part.”

The newspaper added: “The residents of the growing suburban district between the Walkerville tramway and the Hampstead Hotel have resumed their endeavour to get the tramway line extended for about three quarters of a mile along the north-east road, to take in the newly settled areas which give promise of speedy expansion.”

The “time was ripe” for this expansion “particularly because, besides the increasing local population, the trams would also assist country people from Manura, Mount Pleasant and the immediate districts to complete their journeys to the city with greater expedition, and facilitate the sporting associations which hold their meetings at Hampstead.”

The Hampstead Hotel was at the centre of the growth of Prospect and its surrounds.