Bath Hotel

A Traditional Pub Serving Sam Smiths Strong Ales.

At the beginning of the 19th century the site of the Bath Hotel was a field known as Hannah Parker's Ing, lying next to the Wakefield Halifax turnpike road, itself a medieval route which had been improved in 1740 - 1. The 1803 rating valuation for Dewsbury shows it then to have been owed by John Taylor & occupied by Sarah Wigglesworth. However by 1813 there was already a house on the site. In that year it was sold by George Breary to Abraham Greenwood, a prominent landowner in the Dewsbury Moor area of the township.

Greenwood sold the house at Parker Ing in 1852 to Matthew Ridgeway, who the following year sold it to James Walker. The property sold by Greenwood was quite large (3 acres & 3 perches - 14, 610 yards), but not all of this was sold by Walker. The majority was kept by Matthew Ridgeway who farmed it as a market garden. It was this that gave the pub its first name. Sometime between 1853 & 1861 Walker turned the property into a pub, of which the landlord who brewed his own beer in a brew house on the premises. He called it 'The Garden House Tavern'.

The name changed to 'The Bath Hotel' a decade or so later When Dewsbury's first municipal swimming baths were opened nearby, in what is now the Drill Hall. By this time too, the pub passed from walker to Henry Cullingworth, a prominent local rag auctioneer and one time postmaster of Dewsbury, who bought it in 1872.

The Cullingworths did not run the pub themselves, but had remained the owners until 1920 when they sold the property to J A Benson, a small time landlord with some houses in Victoria Road. He actually kept 'The Bath' as well as owning it, until 19th July 1923 when it was bought by Samuel Smiths, the Tadcaster brewery who have owned it ever since.