Also known as: The Traveller’s Home, Plough Inn, Lower Riccarton Hotel, DB Riccarton, Nancy’s, Fat Ladies Arms
Location: 1 Riccarton Road, corner of Deans Avenue, Riccarton, Christchurch
Current status: Demolished
Active: c.1853–2000s
History
The Riccarton Hotel — known to generations of Christchurch drinkers simply as Nancy’s — is among the oldest licensed premises in Canterbury. The earliest known reference appears in the Canterbury Almanack of 1853, where it was advertised as “The Traveller’s Home” by James Murrey, situated at the corner of Hagley Park and Riccarton Road. Over subsequent decades the hotel passed through a succession of licensees — trading at one stage as the Plough Inn — before being formally renamed the Riccarton Hotel, though locals continued calling it the Plough well into the 1930s.
In 1930, Herbert (Bert) and Annie Isobel Hancock purchased the freehold outright. Bert’s death the following year — from injuries sustained falling through a trapdoor into the cellar — left Annie in charge. Known to everyone as Nancy, she ran the hotel for nearly four decades, building it into one of Christchurch’s best-loved neighbourhood pubs. In 1970, DB Breweries acquired the Riccarton Hotel — briefly known thereafter as DB Riccarton — though the pub continued trading much as before. The affection in which Nancy was held was such that the name stuck long after she retired; she died in February 1982.
From the early 1960s the hotel drew a student crowd from the nearby University of Canterbury, whose Ilam Road campus was a short walk away. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Nancy’s was part of the broader Canterbury pub circuit that sustained live music across the city. While the Dux de Lux, the Gladstone, and Warner’s Hotel drew the headline acts, neighbourhood pubs like Nancy’s provided the backbone of the scene — regular Friday and Saturday night bands, locals finding their feet, and the steady social engine that kept original music alive between the bigger rooms. Among the acts that played the Riccarton in the pub rock era were the Alley Cats, the Riccardos, Village Gate, Dennis Smith + Ansa, and Fire + Ice.
In the late 1990s the Riccarton Hotel underwent its most dramatic transformation, becoming the Fat Ladies Arms — part of Leo Molloy’s national chain of student-oriented bars that spread across New Zealand in that decade, with branches also in Wellington, Palmerston North, and Auckland. The Christchurch Fat Ladies Arms kept its student base and was remembered for radio advertisements voiced by Molloy himself, promoting nightly specials and ending with the chain’s slogan: “the best bar in the world, and that’s a fact.” The hotel’s corner position opposite Hagley Park and its proximity to the university campus made it a natural fit for the Fat Ladies Arms format, and it remained busy through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s.
The end came sometime in the 2000s when the building — which had stood on that corner for over 150 years in one form or another — was demolished and the site converted. A Monster Chicken restaurant now occupies the corner of Riccarton Road and Deans Avenue where the Traveller’s Home, the Plough, the Riccarton Hotel, and Nancy’s once stood. A photograph survives from circa 1885, held by Christchurch City Libraries, showing the hotel looking west up Riccarton Road — a timber building with verandahs, fencing, and a flagpole, framed by the trees that would have been familiar to generations of Riccarton drinkers.
Nancy Hancock continued to visit the hotel for a while, and then, becoming increasingly frail, she moved to Wellington to live with her brother Johnny Johnston until the closing bell rang for the last time for Nancy Hancock in February 1982.
Poddimok, The Watering Holes: An Historical Essay