Please note, this is an archived story. Please check the date above.

That was written in 1808 about the Bridgewater Arms on High Street (Bridgewater Place marks the site). So two hundred years ago people were moaning about the way pubs change, and we're been doing it ever since. Some Manchester pubs have been altered to a great extent and others less so. Thirty years ago, opening-up pub interiors to create one or two big rooms was the fashion and all central Manchester pubs have suffered from this, with the exception of the Circus on Portland Street. There is still a wall separating the front and the back rooms of what was first a private house and then a shop.

The Peveril of the Peak is famous for its tiling and its three separate rooms, but in the last century, before the top floor was taken off, the place boasted six drinking rooms as well as the bar and a kitchen. Many pubs had an upstairs meeting or club room. The one at the Crown and Anchor on Hilton Street was capable of holding 150 people and on the same floor there was another drinking room. Downstairs was a wine and spirit vault, bar parlour, tap room and another parlour. The house next door on Port Street, now incorporated into the pub, was used as a corn store.

The name game. The Fleece Inn became the Kingston Hotel in the 1960s. Recognise it? This pub is still with us today as Paddy's Goose.

Upstairs there was the music salon, complete with piano and a self-acting organ (the jukebox of its day) which could play forty favourite tunes, airs and overtures. Oil paintings in gilt frames depicting historical scenes hung on the walls. On the same floor was a sitting room which was sometimes used as a temporary bar. Overnight guests had the choice of six lodging rooms containing four-post and tent bedsteads, feather beds and mattresses, chests of drawers and washstands.

The ornate Sawyers Arms in the 1960s. The hefty piece of masonry perched on the roof has gone.

The pubs around Swan Street and Tib Street had busy vault trades when Smithfield Market was there. The Smithfield Market House opened in 1823 in what is now the back (Coop Street) part of the pub.

Some years later the owner took over a grocer's shop on the Swan Street corner and put the two together to create a long vault. Behind the counter, which ran the length of the Coop Street side of the building, were ranged ten 20-gallon casks, supplied with beer from the pub's own brewery.

Fashions in exterior decoration have changed over the years and garish adornments of seventy or eighty years ago can now be considered quite stylish, worth preserving, or at least acceptable. An architectural survey in 1924 said the Sawyers Arms on Deansgate was 'a glazed, multi-coloured sprawling public-house which event the soot cannot make bearable.' The Sawyers was one of a number of pubs given the striking glazed brick and tile treatment by the Manchester Brewery Company. The Peveril of the Peak and the now closed Lower Turks Head on Shudehill are two others.

Cement rendering over old brickwork helps to keep out the damp and there are many old buildings in the city which have been so treated.

Repainting every few years keeps them looking smart, and in the case of Sinclairs Oyster Bar, the addition of a few black stripes in the 1930s in imitation of the nearby Wellington was an amusing touch. In view of the fact that the new Sinclairs on Hanging Ditch is being built to appear as it was in the Shambles, whoever though that up must still be laughing.