The Regency is the bar of the Terra Nova, a 1924 mansion on Waterloo Road built with rum money and handed on as a wedding present to the woman whose son founded Island Records. The bar itself is a hotel bar with no separate history worth inventing. The house has one of the best stories in uptown Kingston, and it is expensive by Kingston standards, so go for a drink rather than a night.
History
Built for a woman who died before she could use it
The Terra Nova was built in 1924 on ten acres at 17 Waterloo Road by the Hon. Horace Victor Myers, MBE, JP, who lived from 1876 to 1944. He was chairman and managing director of Fred L. Myers & Son from 1919 to 1940, the Kingston firm that Frederick Louis Myers started in 1879 and whose dark rum still carries the family name. So the house is rum money, made in Kingston, spent in Kingston.
He built it for his wife, May da Costa Myers, born 1874, described in the record as one of the leading society hostesses in Jamaica, expressly so that she could entertain high society in lavish style. She died in 1925, less than a year after the mansion was finished. A great house built for a single purpose, and the purpose lasted a few months.
The wedding present
Myers sold Terra Nova in the early 1930s to a wealthy Kingston merchant and planter. Sources name him differently: the hotel history record calls him Percival "Percy" Henriques, while Blanche Blackwell's own biography names her father as Percy Lindo, of the Sephardi Jewish family that had been trading in Jamaica since the eighteenth century. We cannot reconcile the two, so we are flagging it rather than picking one.
What is not disputed is what he did with it. In 1936 he gave Terra Nova to his daughter Blanche as a wedding present on her marriage to Joseph Blackwell, an officer in the Irish Guards and an heir to the Crosse & Blackwell food fortune. Their only child, Christopher, was born the following year. Chris Blackwell founded Island Records, signed Bob Marley and the Wailers, and did more than any other single person to put Jamaican music into the rest of the world. Blanche divorced in 1949, stayed in Jamaica, and in 1956 met Ian Fleming at a dinner party; she is widely believed to have fed the characters of Honeychile Ryder and Pussy Galore. She died in 2017, aged 104.
Hotel, 1959 onwards
The Blackwell family sold the mansion in 1959 and it opened as the Terra Nova Hotel. Extensive remodelling and a new wing followed in the mid 1960s, and from 1962 the maitre d' was Roc Pavesi, who worked there on and off for about eighteen years and whose departure in 1980 is treated in the hotel's own history as the end of its great period.
In 1982 the hotel, then owned by West Indies Caribbean Development, was sold to Memphis Catering, which sold the real estate on to National Commercial Bank within two days for an estimated two million dollars in profit. A major refurbishment followed in 2001, after which it traded as the Terra Nova All-Suite Hotel. In August 2025 it joined the BW Premier Collection, the first such property in Jamaica, a soft brand arrangement that leaves it independently run.
The Regency Bar and Lounge sits inside all of that. It is a hotel bar. There is no separate founding date, no named barman and no documented origin story for it, and any article that gives you one has made it up.
What it costs and when it opens
Waterloo Road, Kingston 10, just off Half Way Tree Road. The hotel is on 876 926 2211 or 876 926 1234.
Published hours disagree. Moon Jamaica gives 11am to 1am Monday to Thursday, 11am to 2am Friday and Saturday and 11am to midnight on Sunday, while other listings give a 2pm start and an earlier close on quiet nights. Ring before you plan around it.
This is priced as an uptown hotel bar, not a street bar, and Moon puts it at the top of its price band. Rooms at the hotel run around US$200 a night, which tells you the neighbourhood the drinks list is in. The kitchen does meat and seafood sliders, salads and comfort dishes, with the double pork chops, seafood casserole and confit chicken the ones people mention. We have not found a reliable current menu with prices, so treat any figure you see online as indicative.
What it is actually like
Two rooms in effect: an interior done in a Victorian-influenced style, and a courtyard with mature tropical planting that is the better place to sit on a warm evening. The clientele is hotel guests, Kingston business people and uptown regulars, and the mood is conversational rather than loud. It is one of the few genuinely quiet places to drink in this part of Kingston.
Weeknights are calm and you will get a table. Weekends fill and there is often music. There is no published dress code, but this is an uptown hotel and people dress for it, so do not turn up in beach clothes.
How it fits a day
Waterloo Road runs off Half Way Tree Road, which puts the Regency about five minutes from Devon House, five from the Half-Way-Tree clock and ten from New Kingston. YaadBinge uses it as the civilised first drink of an evening, usually from about 6pm to 8pm, after an afternoon at Devon House or Hope Gardens.
Allow an hour and a half. It works better as an opener than a destination, because the interesting nightlife runs later and elsewhere, and because the pleasure here is the courtyard at dusk rather than anything that happens at midnight.
