The Death of An English Pub

The two drinking establishments closest to me were both built as estate pubs in the sixties, one by Chesters Brewery at the start of the decade and the other by Holt's towards the end of it.

The latter has been transformed by successive rebuilds and refurbishments into a dining pub, but the former remained a community local until it shut a couple of years ago. The site wasn't secured properly and the building was vandalised, with the cellar becoming an unofficial youth club, and last week damaged by a fire.

It's on an overspill estate built by Manchester council in the fifties and has been keg-only since at least the late eighties when I first went, although I'd guess it served cask beer when it opened in the early sixties (Threlfalls bought Chesters in 1961, and was then taken over in 1967 by Whitbread, who in 1988 shut their brewery in Salford, which is now a conference centre).

The site is still for sale, but at £1.2 million, and more needed to be spent on repairs if it were to reopen as a pub, the likelihood now must be that a developer will buy it and demolish the semi-derelict structure before building houses there.

Has the wet-led community local a future then? Although a few still seem to thrive, the statistics suggest that many do not, with several others already having been shut and knocked down locally (tellingly, the former landlord of the one awaiting its fate near me now runs a micropub serving wine and gin as well as beer in a small unit on the adjacent parade of shops).

Bottles of beer for the boys

I was looking through a photo album yesterday and spotted a couple of photos of my mum's dad that I hadn't seen for a while.

He was born in Beswick, east Manchester, in 1909, but grew up in Old Trafford, started work as an apprentice at the nearby Metrovicks engineering factory in Trafford Park in the late twenties and became a toolmaker and a shop steward in the Amalgamated Engineering Union (one of his mates on the shop floor was Hugh Scanlon, who became President of the union in 1968). He moved to the new Manchester Corporation housing estate at Wythenshawe just before he got married in 1938, and to Metrovicks' Wythenshawe Works when it opened in the late fifties, working there until it closed in the early seventies, and he became a porter at Barnes Hospital.

The first photo is of a works social for long-serving employees, sometime in the sixties in the canteen at Wythenshawe Works. My grandad is on the left (naturally) in the light suit and glasses.

Apart from all the men wearing ties (I wonder who put an end to that tradition?), the other thing you notice is the beer bottles lined up along the table, supplied by the company for the event. I'm not sure any employer now serves alcohol to its workers on the premises given the potential for litigation if things go awry. although I think some still open a bar tab at a venue off-site for them, and even then there are possible legal pitfalls (by the time I started working in the civil service in the nineties, drinking at office parties had been banned after someone fell to their death from a window at one in Salford). Even zooming in on the photos, it's hard to make out the label on the beer bottles, but I think it might just be that of Groves & Whitnall, the brewery which inspired Coronation Street's Newton & Ridley.

The second photo, from around the same time, is of my grandad eating his butties at his work bench. He's also reading The Sun, which had replaced the Daily Herald in 1964 and was still then a Labour-supporting newspaper, and would remain one even under Rupert Murdoch's ownership until the mid-seventies.

Part of the Union: my grandad's 1963-64 AEU membership card

Lancashire League

The Rugby Football League, the governing body of rugby league in England, has announced that it is relocating its headquarters from Leeds to Manchester.

By the start of the 2021 World Cup, the RFL will base itself at the Etihad Campus in east Manchester, the sporting complex which already includes national cycling and squash venues, an athletics track and the two stadia where Manchester City's first, youth and women's teams play their home matches, where the England rugby league team will also train ahead of international fixtures.

Manchester being pretty much equidistant between the sport's two main heartlands, southwest Lancashire and west Yorkshire, with road and rail links between them going through the city, was the reason why the Magic Weekend, the annual event where a round of Super League matches is played across two days at the same stadium, was held here from 2012 to 2014, before moving up to Newcastle's St. James' Park when Manchester City began expanding their ground, towards a projected final capacity of 61,000. I can now see that event taking place here permanently, as well as perhaps the Super League Grand Final now played at Old Trafford (although the showpiece Challenge Cup Final is unlikely to head North again from Wembley, its home since the late 1920's), and international and World Club Challenge matches too.

Although they are unlikely to relocate permanently outside the boundaries of their city, I'd also like to see Salford rugby league club play a few matches at the 7,000 capacity Academy Stadium there (pre-season friendlies to start with, say), both because of the much better public transport services to it compared to those to their home ground at Barton-upon-Irwell (itself outside the historic boundaries of Salford) and as part of the wider missionaty effort to extend the appeal of the game beyond its traditional heartlands.

Coronation Street capers

I've been watching re-runs of Coronation Street from 1986 on ITV3 for the last week or so, episodes which I probably watched when they were originally broadcast.

The first thing to say about them is that the show was far funnier then, with many more comic characters and storylines than there seems to be now (I gave up watching it regularly a few years back, partly for that reason) rather than the Eastenders-style grimness which seems to have crept in since, with lots of sparkling repartee between brassy Rovers Return landlady Bet Lynch and the conniving showbusiness agent (and her future husband) Alec Gilroy, the newsagent's shop-running duo of Rita and Mavis (and her hapless fiance Derek) and the malapropisms and wall-adorning "muriel" of pub cleaner Hilda Ogden. The main difference there is the number of boxed keg beer taps on the bar - something you don't see much now outside of Sam Smith's pubs - rather than the more traditional handpumps which have since replaced them.

The main reason for the drop in quality is no doubt the increase of episodes from two to six a week, requiring the scriptwriters to stretch out storylines and make them more melodramatic.

That problem funnily enough is one which the only soap I now watch regularly, the Australian Neighbours, seems to have overcome, despite being broadcast daily, mostly maintaining quality and the fine balance between comedy and drama.

Salford not for sale

I wasn't particularly surprised the other day when Marwan Koukash, owner of Salford rugby league club, announced that he was relinquishing control and handing it over to a supporters' trust. I'd been expecting something along those lines at the end of a season in which, despite the money he's put into the team and the highish league position that they achieved, attendances at matches have continued to fall.

When Salford moved to their new ground in Barton-on-Irwell from their longtime home at the Willows in Weaste in 2012, attendances were about 5,000. The stated aim of the move was to at least double that; instead, they are now around half, often bolstered by away rather than home fans supporting their team, and even some season ticket holders no longer attend as many matches as before.

Salford had apparently been told by the Rugby Football League that the Willows was no longer a fit ground for the twenty-first century, hence the move to Barton and a new 12,000-capacity stadium there, jointly owned by Salford City Council and Peel Holdings, owners of the nearby Trafford Centre shopping mall.

A modern ground, even one that incorporated standing areas and offered cheap tickets, was never going to have either the atmosphere or historical associations of the Willows, where Salford had played since 1901, but there have been many other problems with the site too.

I remember at the last match at the Willows, while in the queue for the turnstiles, some fans complaining that in moving to Barton the club was leaving the traditional (i.e. pre-1974) boundaries of Salford, and although that might be a minority opinion there's definitely a feeling that a lot of fans who walked to the ground from the club's Weaste and Pendleton heartlands in the past now no longer bother.

Public transport isn't great to the new ground - the nearest train stations and tram stops are at least a mile away - the proposed tram line to Port Salford, the freight terminal on the Ship Canal also owned by Peel Holdings, which will include a stop nearby, isn't scheduled to open for another four years, and the long access road to the ground means that, despite there being a large, free car park outside, the time it takes to leave it at the end of matches has led many fans to give up using it and parking in the Peel Green housing estate opposite instead.

There has been some talk of Salford not taking enough advantage of their potential fanbase in the neighbouring city of Manchester, and while the idea of that city's name being incorporated into the club's has rightly been rejected, there is some truth to it, especially with their location miles out from the centre in Barton not helping with that.

If the funds could be found, the ideal solution would be to build a ground in the part of Salford that adjoins Manchester city centre, with its numerous transport hubs, but I suspect that they can't, what with the financial support Koukash has given about to be withdrawn and the money from the naming rights to the ground going to Sale Sharks rugby union club, Salford's co-tenants at Barton.

Rugby league has always been dependent on local businessmen becoming owners and directors of its clubs, whether for the prestige or connections that gave them, much like football clubs up until the last quarter of a century in which they have either become PLC's or been transferred to offshore trusts in exotic tax havens controlled by American or Middle and Far Eastern billionaires.

It's hard to see then how, without an alternate source of outside income, a supporters trust will work at Salford, the first board of which is apparently going to be appointed by the outgoing owner. It seems that rather than generously gifting the club to its fans, he is instead walking away from it, perhaps understandably given the circumstances, and taking with him the money which he is no longer willing to put into its continued maintenance.

Beyond A Boundary

I went to a rugby league match between Swinton and Workington at Heywood Road, Sale, yesterday afternoon.

Since leaving their Station Road home in 1992, Swinton have played at a few grounds, including Gigg Lane, Bury, and Park Lane, Whitefield. Their new home at Sale is shared with the amateur rugby union club of that name whose professional offshoot, Sale Sharks, left for Edgeley Park, Stockport, in 2003 before moving into the AJ Bell Stadium in Barton-on-Irwell with Salford Red Devils rugby league club in 2012.

Sale is quite a distance from Swinton, as is Barton from Sale. In relocating to Barton from their home at The Willows, the Red Devils moved within the City, but outside the traditional boundaries, of Salford. Manchester United's ground at Old Trafford is just outside the boundaries of the City of Manchester, having moved there from Newton Heath in 1910, and Arsenal began life in Woolwich, south London, before moving north of the river in 1913. So how far can a club move before the connection between its name and history and geographical location is severed?

Most people would, I think, regard AFC Wimbledon as the continuation of Wimbledon FC rather than Buckinghamshire outfit Milton Keynes Dons, although neither side now claim the honours of the historic club. The real difference seems to be between moving outside a conurbation (London, Greater Manchester) and relocating within it, especially if, as with Swinton and AFC Wimbledon, you're still looking to build a ground back in the place you originally came from.

Of course, in the United States, not only would such moves within cities not even register with all but the most diehard of fans, nor seemingly do the multiple moves franchises in the four major sports (American football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey) make, so baseball's Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants can relocate from the East Coast to the West without dropping their nicknames or records and in the NFL the Cleveland Browns can become the Baltimore Ravens while the Oakland Raiders leave for Los Angeles before moving back to Northern California and resuming play under their original name.

Bikers ride into town

I've just watched the latest episode of Pubs That Built Britain, a new BBC2 series in which Dave Myers and Simon King, aka the Hairy Bikers, tour the country and discuss the history of pubs.

Pubs and beer have featured quite a bit in the pair's travels around Europe and Asia and I also remember reading an interview with them a couple of years back in CAMRA's Beer magazine in which Dave reminisced about sipping a half of Cameron's in the snug of the local while doing his homework as a schoolboy in Barrow.

Last night, they went to pubs in and around Manchester, including many I know well - the Briton's Protection and Peveril of the Peak in Manchester and the King's Arms and Star Inn in Salford - and to Robinson's Brewery in Stockport which I've been round a few times on tours.

It's good that the BBC has produced a programme celebrating British beer and pubs, although I suspect they'll get more than a few complaints from the prohibitionists about it.

Join the Red Revolution

Salford rugby league club is relaunching itself at the last game of the season on Friday.

In a so-called Red Revolution, Salford's new owner Marwan Koukash is rebranding the club as Salford Red Devils.

I've always liked the fact that Salford, unlike other rugby league clubs, has avoided silly names such as Bulls, Broncos and Rhinos and stuck to simple ones connected to its history, first Reds and now Red Devils (the nickname apparently comes from a 1934 tour of France where a journalist dubbed them "les diables rouges").

Although the Salford rebranding has obvious socialist connotations, it also reminds me a bit of the advertising for one of the worst beers ever brewed in Britain.

Engels in Manchester

The remains of the Albert Club in Chorlton-on-Medlock have been discovered on the building site of a new scientific institute at Manchester University.

Among the club's members in the mid-nineetenth century was Friedrich Engels, the exiled communist theoretician who in between riding with the Cheshire Hunt and running the Ermen and Engels factory in Salford relaxed with his fellow German cotton manufacturers there.  I wonder if they imported German sausages and beer to eat and drink?

Salford Reds arising

Salford rugby league club kick off the new Super League season tonight with a home game against Wigan.

A month ago, it was looking more than likely not only that Salford wouldn't be playing tonight but also that they wouldn't exist as a Super League club. HM Revenue and Customs were knocking on the door with a £300,000 bill for unpaid taxes and two players were also owed £70,000 in wages.  The High Court gave the club a month to find the money or be wound up.

Thankfully, a saviour has been found in the shape of Dr Marwan Koukash, a Kuwaiti-born businessman and race horse owner with apparently deep pockets who was converted to rugby league a couple of years ago by his friend Eamonn McManus, the owner of St Helens.

Dr Koukash has spoken at press conferences about spending millions on player development as well as improving road access to the stadium. I've no idea why he's decided to spend his money on Salford, I'm just glad he has.

Manchester, so much to answer for

People in areas of North Manchester and Salford are now living in "extreme poverty" according to a new report.

Harpurhey in North Manchester and Langworthy in Salford are amongst the country's most deprived wards in terms of joblessness, income and crime. The report's recommendations - free public transport for the unemployed, more help with food and energy costs and a living wage - are all fine as far as they go but poverty in Manchester and Salford has structural roots as well.

The truth is that nothing has replaced the engineering factories and docks that closed down here in the 70's and 80's. You can see that if you walk round some of these areas and look at the boarded up houses, shops and pubs. The only long-term answer is for the Government to invest in jobs and housing.

Only connect

Sometimes you can connect seemingly unconnected people through mutual acquaintances or events; at other times you stumble across such connections.

Ahead of my trip to the Rhineland next week, I've just found out that Nico, the singer, actress and Andy Warhol model, was born Christa Päffgen in Cologne and was a member of the city's famous brewing family of that name.

Apparently, before her untimely death in 1988, Nico also lived in North Manchester and Salford, something else I was unaware of.

RIP Jack

The actor Bill Tarmey who died last week aged 71 became synonymous in the public mind with Jack Duckworth, the character he played  on Coronation Street for over thirty years.

Like Jack, Bill was a wryly humourous working-class Mancunian, a construction worker who got into showbiz through singing in clubs. Jack himself was a man of simple tastes, never happier than when tending to the pigeons his long-suffering wife Vera detested, having a flutter on the horses or propping up the bar of the Rovers' Return with a pint of Newton and Ridley's best bitter and one of Betty's hotpots.

The character changed over the years from a womanising, petty thieving "lovable rogue" to a moral compass for the community, under the guidance of his unlikely godfather Ken Barlow.

Newton and Ridley, the brewery that owns the Rovers' Return, was apparently based on Groves and Whitnalls Brewery in Salford and the pub itself on one of the same name on Shudehill, Manchester.

Matchstalk Men

Today is the hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the birth of the artist L.S. Lowry.

People sometimes think that because Lowry painted scenes of working-class and industrial Salford, he must have been left-wing. In fact, he was a lower middle-class Tory whose knowledge of the area was gained collecting rents there. As he said himself:

"At first I detested it, and then, after years I got pretty interested in it, then obsessed by it...One day I missed a train from Pendlebury - a place I had ignored for seven years — and as I left the station I saw the Acme Spinning Company's mill ... The huge black framework of rows of yellow-lit windows standing up against the sad, damp charged afternoon sky. The mill was turning out... I watched this scene — which I'd looked at many times without seeing — with rapture..."

There's a bit of a disdainful attitude to Lowry in the art world - the critic Brian Sewell once did a snobby but quite funny deconstruction of his paintings on TV with the Salford artist Harold Riley defending his mentor.

I quite like Lowry's paintings myself. I first saw them at Salford Art Gallery and then at the Lowry Centre where the collection is now displayed.  They may not be up there with the Italian Renaissance but there's something about the angles and symmetry of the buildings and the famous matchstalk figures have a wistfulness about them. It also helps I suppose that I'm familiar with quite a few of the places Lowry painted in Manchester, Salford and Stockport and that I associate him with the 1978 number one song Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs by local duo Brian and Michael.

Groves and Withnall's?

Groves and Whitnall's was one of Manchester biggest breweries in the 1950's before being taken over by Greenall Whitley and closed in the early 1970's.

I'm not sure where it was exactly although I've seen the building (now converted into flats I think) a few times on the short train ride from Manchester Victoria to Eccles.  A bit of a Googling suggests it was near the junction of Regent Road and Ordsall Lane on the banks of the Irwell in Salford but I can't see it on Street View.

The Coronation Street brewery Newton and Ridley is apparently based on Groves and Whitnall's which the show's scriptwriters would have been able to see from their offices at Granada TV.

Salford Quays ahoy

The owners of the Manchester Ship Canal are expanding the amount of shipping on the waterway by building a series of new container facilities, including one in Salford.

Although referred to as the Port of Manchester, the docks on the Ship Canal that closed in 1982 were mainly in Salford rather Manchester, including those that now make up the Salford Quays shopping and leisure complex.

One of the main reasons for the closure of the docks was containerisation and while there may be some jobs created by the new scheme, it's unlikely we'll ever again see thousands of dockers manually unloading goods from the holds of ships.

Happy Hour Again

One of the first albums I remember buying as a teenager was The Housemartins' London 0 Hull 4.

The Housemartins combined witty, thoughtful lyrics with left-wing politics. They actively supported the Labour Party Young Socialists which I joined in 1987. It's good to see that twenty-five years on lead singer Paul Heaton still retains both his wit and left-wing politics, telling an interviewer that when he was on Question Time "I was asked whether I agreed with the House of Lords being closed, and with the abolition of hereditary peers, so I said, ‘Give them five minutes’ notice and blow the building up’."

Heaton also deserves respect for having bought The King's Arms, a large Victorian pub in Salford, in order to save it from redevelopment.

Hydes seek new start in Salford

The Manchester brewery Hydes has revealed the location they are moving to in Salford. They announced their intention to leave the nineteenth century Queens Brewery in Moss Side some months ago.

According to the press release, "The new facility will house a state of the art brewery, considerably more efficient than the existing plant, and will allow Hydes to reposition its brewing business and focus exclusively on the production of high quality beers targeted at the growing cask ale sector. Not only will this include popular favourites such as Hydes Original and Manchester’s Finest but the new highly flexible brewery plant will enable the company to be more innovative and brew a much wider and more diverse range than ever before, keeping Hydes at the forefront of the cask category."

It's good news that Hydes is going to expand the number of cask beers it brews. I like their Original session bitter and golden ale Jekyll's Gold and I'm looking forward to seeing what they produce in Salford. Maybe a stout to reflect their pub signage?

Brand new in Barton

I was at Salford City Stadium in Barton-upon-Irwell on Easter Monday, my first trip to the new home of Salford rugby league club.

Salford's new stadium was always going to feel different to The Willows, the ground where they played from 1901 to 2011.  In part, it's because it's new and hasn't got the history associated with The Willows.  But it's also to do with design: it's similar to Warrington's new ground in having two seated stands facing each other with smaller standing terraces behind the goalposts.

I know Salford only rent the stadium (it's owned by a joint company formed by Salford City Council and Peel Holdings, owners of the Trafford Centre shopping complex just across the Manchester Ship Canal) and I wonder how much input they had in its design. Having watched baseball at Camden Yards in Baltimore, the prototypical retro ballpark, I know that even with a new stadium, brick and wood lend far more character than concrete and steel.

Salford, like other rugby league clubs, have effectively been blackmailed into leaving their historic grounds for modern stadiums by the threat of not having their Super League licence renewed. To Salford's credit, they've listened to their fans and included standing areas. Ticket prices are also still reasonable - £20 to sit or stand. The atmosphere on the home standing terrace is still pretty good although the noise is not captured like it was by the low-roofed Shed at The Willows. On the other hand, cantilevering means the view isn't blocked by roof supports. The terraces aren't quite as close to the pitch and from where I was standing in the South Stand the main stand seats looked a lot further away.

On the pitch, Salford are playing open, exciting rugby at the moment and are surely hoping that the extra revenues generated by the new stadium will allow them to be genuine Super League contenders in the next few seasons.

Salford here we come

A couple of weeks ago, Hydes Brewery in Manchester announced that it is moving from Moss Side to a new site in Salford.

Hydes have been in business since 1863 and at the Queens Brewery since 1899 (it's unclear what will happen to this, apparently it's a listed building). The new brewery is on a site near Salford Quays, next to where the BBC has moved. It will, at least initially, have a smaller brewing capacity than the existing brewery as Hydes will only be brewing cask beer. Their smooth beers and contract-brewed Harp lager are going, to be replaced by other breweries' products in Hydes' tied estate. More significantly, the cask Boddingtons Bitter that Hydes has contract brewed for Inbev since the Strangeways Brewery closed in 2005 is also being discontinued.

I thought Hydes cask Boddingtons Bitter was a decent version of the beer I drank a fair bit of in my youth, although that itself was nowhere near as good as it had been according to older generations of Mancunian drinkers. Clearly sales have been dropping since InBev took over Whitbread in 2000 (who had themselves taken over Boddingtons in 1989) - I haven't seen cask Boddingtons Bitter in a pub in Manchester for about five years.

Will Hydes still call themselves The Manchester Brewer after the move to Salford? I suppose it's the first large-scale brewing in the city since Whitbread closed the Cook Street Brewery that once produced Threlfalls and Chesters beers.