The Admiral Benbow.

The inn was first recorded in 1835 as the Talbot Tap, which was probably connected to the Talbot Hotel in Market Street. It was a beer house where the coachmen and servants of the wealthier classes would stay while their masters and mistresses were being entertained in the grander surroundings of the hotel. A Talbot was a dog and is an emblem on the arms of the Earls of Shrewsbury whose family name was Talbot.

The inn was first recorded as the Admiral Benbow in1861 around ten years after the hotel closed. It commemorates Shrewsbury's greatest navel commander Admiral John Benbow, the son of a local tanner, who was born in a house on Coton Hill around 1650. Part of the house remained in Furrows Garage until the building was demolished in 2004. In a glass fronted case on the side of the house was a section of a sycamore tree with a key hanging from a rusty old nail. It was supposed to have been put there by Benbow on the day he ran away to sea as a boy. William III called him "Honest Benbow" and he has become known as the Nelson of the 17th century.

He fought the French off Beachy Head in 1690 and at La Hague in 1692. His greatest battle was off the coast of Jamaica where he drove off a much larger French fleet after some of his captains refused to fight. During the battle he was mortally wounded but his gallantry is recorded in a ballad that tells us that after having his legs removed by chain-shot, he remained in control of the battle by having his bed brought up onto the quarterdeck. His remains lie in St. Andrew's Church in Kingston Jamaica and in 1841 a beautiful marble monument was erected to his memory in St. Mary's Church after £60 was raised by a number of Shrewsbury residents.

In 1900 the brewers Brindley & Co of Burton-on-Trent owned the inn. The building, which dates from around 1800 had five private and four public rooms, there was also stabling at the rear for eleven horses.

During the last century the inn's most popular landlord was H. "Happy Sheldon" who moved from the Coach and Horses just two doors away in 1937 and was there until his death in 1957. In 1943 he displayed a potato on his bar that was in the shape of a "V" for victory and had been dug up by one of his customers Mr. Fred Williams in his garden in Castlefields.