Last Orders at my First Local

The first pub I drank in regularly in the late eighties was a large Whitbread house, built in mock Tudor style by Chester's Brewery of Ardwick in the mid thirties, where between the age of eighteen and twenty I supped gallons of their keg bitter, Trophy (I also occasionally drank Holt's cask bitter at what we then regarded as the old man's pub down the road, which later became my local for another decade or so).

Our visits to the first pub came to an abrupt end when it reopened after a refurbishment, the lounge having become a restaurant and the small carvery at the side of it a bar, with higher drinks prices and a strict dress code which effectively excluded the younger drinkers who had frequented it in large numbers before its transformation into a more upmarket dining place.

A few years later, Whitbread built a Premier Inn hotel next to the pub/restaurant - an obvious move given the proximity of Manchester Airport, the end of whose main runway lies just a few hundred yards beyond its car park - and it soon came to depend on trade from that rather than locals.

Now, as part of a national programme of such conversions, it's closing, with the space being turned into extra hotel rooms, so on its final night of opening I popped in for a last drink there.

I was worried that it might be dead, but it was actually rammed, mostly by people my age, with a few fellow nostalgics no doubt amongst the crush at the bar. It often had cask beer on after I stopped going in regularly, lately a single handpump for Doom Bar, although I never saw anyone order it and always swerved it myself, so it was the usual default choice of Draught Guinness, which was a decent enough pint. At half past eight, the landlord rang the bell for last orders for the final time and a few champagne corks flew through the air, at nine the doors shut, and that was that. 

It was nothing like the pub or the atmosphere I drank in as a teenager thirty-five years ago, but I'm glad I was there to see it go under the waves.

There is a history of the pub here