| Manchester Pubs - A History |
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| Written by Archive | |
| Sunday, 19 March 2000 | |
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Please note, this is an archived story. Please check the date above. | |
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Nearly all the surviving 'old' pubs in the city centre were built in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, opening as the town was developing as a centre of commerce and industry. In 1650 the town of Manchester consisted of houses built around the Old Church and the Market Place, Long Millgate, the top end of Deansgate and Market Street: walk along Deansgate for more than a couple of hundred yards or beyond the end of Market Street and you were out in the fields. Within this area there were about fifty alehouses and four of five more substantial inns. A century later the town had spread and the number of alehouse licences had increased to about 160. Some of the ancient inns were rebuilt and a few survived to modern times, but all these have now gone and the last to go was the oldest, the Bulls Head, which was destroyed when the Market Place was bombed in 1940. The sites of some old inns can still be identified, just. The Printworks development on the corner of Withy Grove and Corporation Street marks the site of the Old Boars Head (below). This was built in the 1720s to replace a timer framed alehouse and survived until the 1920s when Kemsley House, 'the largest newspaper printing office in the world', was built across the site. The four-storey fa?ade of the inn was reflected in the design of the newspaper office.  The Old Boars Head, on the site of The Printworks Over on Deansgate, on the north side of the passageway which is now all that is left of Parsonage Lane, next to the building which now houses the RSVP caf? bar, was the White Lion. The inn, with its yard and gardens extended back along the lane to the Parsonage. Houses were built on part of the site in the 1750s and the pub itself closed about a hundred years after that. While Manchester's oldest inns haven't survived, there are two pubs which can be traced back to alehouses of the pre-industrial age (before about 1750). The Crown and Cushion on Corporation Street was built in the early twentieth century on the site of the Old Crown, which opened around 1741. At the other end of town, the Pack Horse on Deansgate was built in the 1890s on the site of a century-old alehouse which itself replaced an earlier Pack Horse across the road, pulled down to make way for a warehouse when the Bridgewater Canal came to town. The construction of the canal terminus at Castlefield led to the opening of the first pubs on Liverpool Road. The White Lion (below) could well be one of Manchester's oldest, although it doesn't seem to have been licensed continuously until the early 1800s. The records show that in 1777 Abraham Collier opened an alehouse in Manchester called the White Lion and it may have been this one as the street at the side of the pub is called Collier Street. The original property included a brewhouse, stables and houses on both Liverpool Street and Collier Street.  The White Lion, Liverpool Road The list below gives opening dates for some of today's central Manchester pubs. The years are those when the pubs became continuously licensed and some, like the White Lion, may be able to claim an earlier founding date. The Britons Protection was licensed from 1806, but in 1795-97 there was an alehouse with the sign of the Ancient Briton, which could have been the same place. The Mitre Hotel is on the site of an alehouse called the Old Church Inn which existed before 1780, but the licence seems to have been given up and it wasn't taken out again until 1808. Open dates to 1830
The list includes pubs which have been rebuilt on their original sites. 1741 Crown and Cushion, Corporation Street |
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