Watch these amazing finds by a Chesterfield town centre pub manager

The Hidden Knight - formerly the Welbeck Inn - is living up to its name as general manager Rebecca Hurd found when she began exploring the building on Soresby Street.

Rebecca said that she had uncovered about a dozen rooms underground that she didn’t know existed.

She said: "There are the normal three rooms downstairs that we use - the drop where the beer comes in, the cold cellar where the barrels and beers are kept and another storage room.

"Another room was boarded up and when the doors came off that we found three or four pig pens, with sand and soil on the floor. We thought we'd found everything but when I went downstairs with the guy who came to look at the fire system we found at the end of the pig pens that there is another corridor and there are more rooms there.

"One of the rooms was bricked up but had a hole cut in the modern bricks at some point. You can shine your torch down and see a tunnel but you can't see how far it goes and no-one has so far been brave enough to crawl down. There are a couple of customers who do potholing who have offered and I'm sorely tempted to send them down.

"I was told by a customer that used to come in previously that apparently the tunnel goes to the Elder Yard chapel opposite the old Co-op. I don't know how far the tunnel goes - it could have collapsed over the years.

"We think with the tunnels and the vaults there's a massive possibility that knights would have hidden down there.

"It's so exciting. The cellars go under both sides of the road and their footprint is probably three times the footprint of the pub.

"There's loads of stuff down there. I found a bottle of 1977 silver jubilee ale that's not been opened and an old bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale with half the label torn, which you can tell is old because of the sediment. There is also a big Kimberley Ales sign and Kimberley Ales doesn't exist any more".

So far, Rebecca hasn't seen any spooky spirits during her underground explorations but she's not discounting that there could be a ghost in The Hidden Knight. She said: "The gas for the beer has been turned off a couple of time when I've been pouring a pint and it couldn’t be another member of staff because they have to ask for the key which I wear it on a lanyard. I've heard that ghosts can either move stuff, you can hear them or you can see them - they can't do more than one."

Rebecca has uncovered more surprising finds in a debris-strewn, disused function room on the upper floor of the building. She said: "There is a piano that has no keys so someone has clearly weighed in the ivory at some point. However, if you drag your fingernails across the strings, it's still pretty much in tune. I've no idea how they got the piano up there in the first place because the staircase is twisted and very narrow. The idea is to get the gubbins out of the piano and use it as a DJ stand with the decks inside which I think would look quite cool.

"There’s newspapers up there from 1968. One cutting from a paper in 1977 advertises a week in Bournemouth for 1978, full board in a hotel, three-course meal and dancing - £35 per person including the coach."

Whether the huge underground labyrinth and upstairs room are restored and brought back into use will depend on fire regulations and how well the pub takes off. Rebecca said: “We need to make some money first before we can entertain it. Having said that, we've been really busy and we're really happy with the feedback from customers. We want it to be a family pub, where people feel welcome and know our names. We're doing jam nights, quiz nights and all the food is home-cooked."

Paul Storey is licensee of The Hidden Knight which reopened under its new name in November 2021. The pub had been closed for a couple of years before it was renovated.

Named the Welbeck Inn for more than a century, the pub was originally called the Wood Vaults, then rebranded as Dyson Vaults and later became Soresby Street Vaults.

Philip Riden, historian and chairman of Chesterfield Civic Society, said: "The name Welbeck is something of a mystery: the dukes of Portland never owned the property, although the Welbeck Abbey family were lords of the manor of Chesterfield between 1631 and 1792 (when the 3rd Duke of Portland exchanged estates with the 5th Duke of Devonshire and the latter got Chesterfield as part of this"

He said that the pub appeared to have been built in 1813 as part of the original development of Soresby Street. The street was constructed on land formerly occupied by Soresby House, a mansion built by the son of a Chesterfield innkeeper, which had a long garden stretching back to Saltergate.

Philip said: "The house was demolished and Soresby Street built through the land, with building plots laid out on each side. It was originally one unbroken street between the Market Place and Saltergate, severed in the 1930s when Knifesmithgate was extended and Rose Hill laid out as a continuation."