The 450-year-old Shropshire pub that vanished in just a few hours

The historic Seven Stars Inn which had huddled alongside the old A5 at Ketley for hundreds of years disappeared in just a few hours in December 1964.

What was said to be the oldest coaching inn on the London to Holyhead road, and the second oldest in Shropshire, was brought crashing down to make way for road widening.

One of its boasts was the inevitable claim that "Highwayman Dick Turpin slept here," which needs to be taken with the usual pinch of salt.

And of course it had its own ghost story.

When the last manager, Mr Charles Garside, took over, he was warned about the ghost of a woman who walked around at night. Allegedly she was a young woman who had been murdered there.

On his first night in the inn he heard a creak of a door opening and "ghostly" noises. But apart from that he never heard nor saw anything of the ghost.

The inn was built around 1576 as a tavern and posting station. According to one disputed account, the old rutted road originally ran behind the inn, not in front of it as it did later.

In the 1700s it was one of the main coaching stations for the mail coaches on the London to Holyhead road. A favourite tale was how a canny old parrot would sit in the window and screech a warning of the approach of a coach.

The walls of the public bar were originally wattle and daub, which was later covered with plaster. Upstairs the bedrooms had sloping floors, uneven walls, and a ceiling a good few degrees out of true.

The Seven Stars was the headquarters of the first sick club in the district, in the days before the National Health Service. It was conceived by Mr John Parton, of Mannerley Lane, to help the ironworkers of the district to make provision for sickness and their demise.

Mr Parton held court in the clubroom at the back of the inn to receive contributions from the membership, who in return got a weekly payment when they were off work and their relatives were assured a lump sum when the breadwinner died.

Until the inn was taken over by Wrekin Breweries in 1927 it was a free house, selling its own home-brewed ale.

Primitive cobbles and other road surfacing materials were unearthed by workmen who built a new Seven Stars only a few yards away from the original pub, the new premises opening on December 18, 1964.

By Christmas, the homely old pub had had its fateful meeting with the demolition men.

The new Seven Stars pub was reopened in May 1988 after a £100,000 revamp as Twentys, which was described as a Video Bar and American-style diner, with 23 hi-tech television video monitors playing non-stop videos and the latest music. Later it became the Elephant and Castle, before closing around 2000 and becoming an Indian restaurant called the Blue Elephant.