Hooe, Plymouth

Hooe is a small suburb of Plymstock, part of the City of Plymouth in the English county of Devon.

Map of Hooe, Plymouth, UK

It has a pleasant site adjacent to the estuary of the River Plym and has been built over the site of the once grand house and estate of Radford, the family seat of the Harris family. Hooe consists of two areas, Higher Hooe and Lower Hooe, with Lower Hooe including the oldest area near to Hooe Lake and the old barn from the former Hooe Barton Farm, demolished in 1969. [1]

Areas around Hooe include Plymstock and Radford to the East and Turnchapel to the north west and Jenny Cliff to the west. Hooe currently has woodland and farmland to the south.

Hooe has one small garage (formerly a Gulf Petrol station), a newsagents, a small convenience store, an Indian takeaway, a Chinese takeaway, a pasty shop and a Post Office.

There is also one School "Hooe Primary School", situated in Lower Hooe, and two pubs, The Royal Oak[2] and The Victoria,[3], although there are three other pubs, The Boringdon Arms (the old quarrymaster's house)[4], The Clovelly Bay Inn [5](formerly the New Inn) and the Hotel Mountbatten [6] nearby in the Turnchapel and Mountbatten areas.

There are five quarries situated around Hooe lake, now all disused and in disrepair. The largest, Hooe Lake quarry, was used to store fuel by the Ministry of Defence until the 1970s after its useful life as a limestone quarry. [7]

Adjacent to the lake at the river end of the estuary are the remains of the old swing bridge used for trains to access Turnchapel from the Oreston side from 1897.[8] [9] It was closed near to the middle of the 20th century shortly after the Second World War. Since then it has remained in a state of disrepair. The bridge itself has now gone but the underlying structure still remains. [10]

At one end of the dam separating the freshwater Radford Lake from tidal Hooe Lake sits an early 19th-century folly known as Radford Castle.