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

Replicas of these pubs are being built on a plot of land near the Cathedral and alongside the old thoroughfare of Half Street (now called Cathedral Street). Half Street linked Old Millgate, which led to the Market Place and the Old Shambles, with Long Millgate and the road out of town to the north. Old Millgate will change as redevelopment continues, because here we are promised a 'Millennium Quarter' to provide 'cultural and visitor uses'.

As the old streets disappear, it is becoming harder to imagine the Manchester of even the recent past. In view of this, and in celebration of Manchester's boozy heritage, a series of articles covering aspects of the history of the city's pubs will be appearing in northmanchester.net, reproduced, with permission, from What's Doing - the CAMRA produced monthly magazine. But first, here's a story of the Half Street of long ago…

This drawing dates back to the 1870s and shows pigs in the yard of the White Lion, an old alehouse which stood on Long Millgate near Fennel Street, where the car park is now

In the middle years of the seventeenth century, a man named William Dunn kept an alehouse on Half Street. During the autumn of 1663 William fell out with one of his neighbours, Ann Saunderson. The lady kept some pigs in a passage between a cellar and the parlour of his alehouse and the animals had chewed and pushed their way through the walls, much to William's annoyance.

As the years went by, the wooden buildings were replaced by ones of brick and stone, and two hundred years after William Dunn, Half Street was lined with a variety of properties, including a couple of pubs and a beerhouse. These were pulled down for the building of the Corn Exchange at the end of the nineteenth century.

Manchester was then a centre for commerce and industry: today it's all about culture and shopping. The Old Shambles was an inconvenient aspect of the city's past, and by way of an apology the Wellington and Sinclairs are being built again in a kind of heritage grotto next to Half Street. For many people who care about the city and the changes affecting it, this is a really daft thing to do. But as the timber-framed new Wellington takes shape, no doubt the ghost of Ann Saunderson's pigs are looking on with interest.

Half Street in the 1890s. The new Wellington and Sinclairs have been built on the site of the three-story building on the right