The old Fountain on East Road
West Mersea had two successive Fountain Hotels. The earlier pub stood on East Road near The Fox. Charles Boggis was its innkeeper around 1908. After the replacement hotel opened, the older building became Alpine Cottage.
The new Fountain at Queens Corner
A larger Fountain Hotel opened at Queens Corner around 1913. It was built during a period of proposed housing and railway development. Plans envisaged renaming East Road as Station Road and using the hotel as a station hotel, but the Mersea railway was never built.
The railway remained a proposal. The new Fountain therefore became a hotel at Queens Corner rather than a station hotel, despite the street-renaming ideas associated with the scheme.
Owners and hotel life
Mary Smith’s family operated the old Fountain and then the new hotel. In 1924 they sold the larger property to Colchester Brewing Company. The adjoining dance hall was part of the hotel’s later social life.
A surviving Mersea Island Golf Club handbook from about 1927 advertised the Fountain under proprietor C. S. Kirby. The advertisement offered accommodation for visiting golfers and parties and named Cope’s ales and stout.
By the early 1950s Dorothy Aldous (née Walker) and Pon Aldous were running the Fountain. Their names appear on a photograph taken with hotel staff around 1952. Frederick John Dixon, a West Mersea man who returned home in 1944 after being taken prisoner in North Africa, also worked behind the hotel bar after the war.
Fountain Court
The Fountain Hotel was demolished in 1999 and the site was redeveloped as Fountain Court housing.