Air Balloon (pub)


The Air Balloon is a public house and road junction at Birdlip, Gloucestershire, England.

Location

The pub is situated next to a roundabout junction with the A417, a major road between Swindon and Gloucester via Cirencester. The A436 meets the A417 at this point; the two roads together form a de facto bypass of Cheltenham between Oxford and Gloucester.

History

The pub opened in 1784 and is probably named after one of the first British balloon flights: the launching of a small hydrogen balloon by Edward Jenner on 2 September 1784, which flew from Berkeley Castle to Kingscote and then on to a field near Birdlip, the year after the pioneering flights of the Montgolfier brothers' hot air balloon and Jacques Charles's hydrogen balloon in Paris. It was known as the Balloon by 1796 and renamed the Air Balloon in 1802. By 1856, the landlord was brewing beer on-site. The premises were part of the Cowley Manor Estate until some time early in the twentieth century. The pub was bought by Greene King in 2004.

Future

The pub has been under threat of demolition as it sits alongside a short section of single-carriageway road which is otherwise a high-quality route between the M4 and M5 motorways. The junction is a notorious accident blackspot; from 1999 to 2014 there were an estimated 340 casualties.
In March 2019, Highways England proposed improvements that would include demolition of the pub. Highways England has ruled out a junction at the Air Balloon as the local geography and steep hills nearby would make it impossible to build a high-quality road meeting modern safety standards. The road could not be routed anywhere else as it would cut through Barrow Wake, which is a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Highways England stated that it would talk to landowners and assess the social impact of the pub's demolition in a further design stage.