The Redan Hotel, 44 York Street (Clyde’s Café in the latter years of the 20th century), was built on land granted to John Harlow in 1729 but which had been in his family’s possession at least four decades earlier. His father, also John, was a ship’s captain in the 1680s and 1690s. He died in 1698, leaving his widow Rachel to raise their four children in their home abutting the State House. The cottage called Rendell House which fronts on Princess Street is probably this earlier house.

The exact date of the construction of the Redan Hotel is unknown, but it was standing in 1795 when William Richardson rented rooms in the large building to soldiers of the 47th Regiment. One such soldier, Sergeant John Turner, purchased the building six years later and opened a grocery store and tavern with his wife. When the 47th Regiment was transferred from Bermuda in 1802, Turner purchased his discharge and returned to St George’s to ‘live out his days’. The childless Turners grew fond of Mayor John Van Norden’s young daughter Sarah, who spent much time with them. Sadly, the Turners’ days in Bermuda were short: she died in 1804 and John died suddenly the following year without making a will. Since it was Turner’s express intention that young Sarah should inherit his property, John Van Norden administered Turner’s estate and continued to board regiment soldiers there.

Captain John Bazalgette of the 99th Regiment was perhaps one such boarder. He met and courted Sarah and the two married in 1811. Following a four-year posting in Halifax, the couple returned to Bermuda and successfully petitioned for the Crown to grant the escheated property to her, as Turner had wished.

Two years later the Bazalgettes had returned to Halifax and Van Norden advertised the property for sale in the Bermuda Gazette as ‘a building 58 feet long, on the south side of Duke of Kent Street [modern Duke of York Street] with an upper floor divided into one spacious room and three of lesser dimensions’. Underneath was an extensive cellar, ‘well adapted’ for a grocery store and nearby were two rooms with cellars below, one of which had a fireplace and was ‘well calculated for a cook room’. Elsewhere on the property were two excellent cisterns. The cook room was almost certainly Rendell House, Redan’s neighbour to the south, which was included in the grant to Sarah Bazalgette.

Four years passed before Van Norden sold the property to Alexander Holmes, a printer who had arrived in Bermuda in January 1819. Holmes set up shop in the Redan where he printed, among other things, a weekly newspaper, The Bermudian—A Commercial, Political and Literary Journal, a competitor of the Bermuda Gazette, which had relocated to Hamilton in 1816 when it became Bermuda’s capital. Holmes published and edited The Bermudian until 1823 when he halted production. By 1831 he had moved to Jamaica where he published the Cornwall Chronicle. In March that year he advertised in his former rival, the Bermuda Gazette, his property in St George’s for sale. He found a buyer two years later in merchant Stephen Egan, an immigrant from Ireland who catered mainly to the needs of the garrison. Egan rented the building to various tenants over the next two decades.

In 1833 a free Black woman named Mary Catterall leased the building. The fact that she had obtained a tavern licence from the Corporation of St George’s marks the first documented use of the Redan as a public house and restaurant, doubtless patronised by the British soldiers from Barrack Hill.

In 1848 the building was the home of Captain G W MacQuarie of the 42nd Highland Regiment, who paid £38 a year in rent to Egan. Nearby Rendell House housed the garrison’s billiard room. In 1849 Stephen Egan sold the property to John Edwards, assistant storekeeper of the Commissariat Department, who continued the tradition begun by John Turner and Mary Catterall; he operated the Redan Hotel and Tavern, named for a famous 1855 battle at Sevastopol during the Crimean War. By 1876 Edwards had added a long wooden verandah to the front of the building which provided a commanding view up and down Duke of York Street.

Late in the 19th century, the Redan was purchased by Thomas Ward Kelly, who also bought neighbouring Foster House. Kelly died in 1895, possessed of no fewer than nine houses in St George’s. Redan House, as it was then called, was auctioned in 1901 to John Kendrick, son-in-law of postal clerk Andrew Greig of Hillcrest. Kendrick transferred the building to his sister Fannie in 1907 who, by 1911, had moved to Oregon and sold it to widow Elizabeth Rankin.

Under Rankin’s tenure, the building once again opened its doors as a restaurant. In 1947 she sold the eatery to chef Clyde Basden, who renamed it Clyde’s Café. In 1990 this landmark closed its doors, breaking the building’s 150-year chain of use as an inn, tavern, hotel and restaurant.

The Georgian main building today is much as John Van Norden described it in 1817. The 19th century wooden verandah that Edwards added was replaced with a concrete one in the early 20th century. The western half of Rendell House to the south has attractive Flemish gables and a side staircase. These early features suggest that it dates back to the John Harlow grant of 1729. The eastern half is more recent, added sometime after 1876.