The Plough Inn, off Cornmarket, which was demolished to make way fro the new Walls Road in c1970, was well over 600 years old. It was originally a religious inn called the Archangel, and stood just outside St. Martin's Gate, to accommodate traveler's that arrived too late to enter the City.
Tradition has it that in about 1840, the name was changed after the landlord remonstrated with a customer to the extent of hitting him over the head with a poker, for which he was jailed for one year. It was thought that the inn no longer justified the name Archangel, so was changed to the Plough.
Parts of the building were very old, and in the cellar could be seen the base of a stone bastion; part of the old city defences. In 1935 on a wall, behind dozens of layers of wallpaper and stretched linen, were found six paintings on pitch-pine panels. Experts dated them as about 1630, the subjects being a watermill, a gondola, and some ships. They were sold to Mr.T. Wyatt, the Worcester antique dealer.
The Plough was famed for an affair with Australia's 'Poet Laureate'. Adam Lindsey Gordon. In 1845 he was a young officer living at Cheltenham, and was due to ride at Crowle Races. The horses was boxed at The Plough, when the bailiff's seized it for the debts of the pecunious owner, and friend of Gordon's. He seized the horse, rode him and won. The stern parents however, had had enough of his larking and packed him off to Australia, where he made a name for himself as a poet.