Crown Inn glory

The Crown in Stockport reopened yesterday after a lengthy, and much needed, refurbishment by its new owners, the father and son who also run the Petersgate Tap between the station and marketplace, so I popped down last night to have a look.

Fifteen or so years ago, the Crown was Stockport's premier pub for cask beer, a multi handpump Victorian boozer beneath the town's famous railway viaduct which, despite not being the closest to the ground, often attracted away fans when their teams played at Edgeley Park (I was in there once on a Saturday dinnertime when a coachload of Southampton fans, whose side were briefly in the third tier, turned up having heard about its reputation for well kept real ale). But then the longtime landlord retired and the place began to drift a bit, a slow side into general shabbiness and average beer that in the last few years has seen a dizzying succession of short term licensees and sudden, unexplained closures.

Thankfully the pub is now in good hands again, with a smartened up look and cask range that I'm sure will get it back into the Good Beer Guide. It also now has Draught Bass as a permanent beer on the bar, which was flying out last night (they were already on their third cask of it!).

Beer and blues in the new Berlin

I went to Stockport beer festival last night, held for the third year in a row at the town's Masonic Guildhall (vale Edgeley Park: Stockport County's successes on the pitch, rising from National League North to EFL League One, and the subsequent redevelopment of the ground and its hospitality and conference facilities, have put it beyond the pocket of the organisers).

Stockport might not quite be the new Berlin, as an international DJ once dubbed it, but with a new bus station, which will now eventually become a tram interchange, a bridge across the Mersey from it to the Runaway microbrewery, which relocated there from Manchester, and some long shut pubs in that area reopening, the town is definitely on the up.

I tend to gravitate towards darker, stronger beers at festivals now, and amongst those I enjoyed last night were a strong dark mild brewed by Thornbridge, on the Burton Union system they acquired from Marston's, in collaboration with Brooklyn Brewery's Garrett Oliver, Krakow Prince, a porter from Poland's only cask beer brewery, and a smoked Redwillow Rauchbier.

On the way back to the station I popped into the Spinning Top, where a blues band was playing covers of some Chicago standards (Howlin' Wolf's Killing Floor, Jimmy Reed's Bright Lights, Big City). The Spinning Top, a music pub housed in a former Indian restaurant, is named after a short story by Franz Kafka, a quote from which is painted on the wall (Kafka spent some time in Berlin, but I don't think he ever made it to Stockport).

A river runs through it

Yesterday's announcement that the South Manchester line of the Metrolink tram system is to be extended from East Didsbury to Stockport was hardly unexpected, but welcome news nonetheless. There will also be new stops on existing sections of track, including one on the Bury line at the southern end of Rochdale Road in Collyhurst, part of a housing regeneration project already being built which will eventually extend north from Victoria station along the Irk Valley.

Like the rest of the South Manchester line, the extension to Stockport is essentially rebuilding something that existed from the late nineteenth century until the Beeching cuts to railway services in the sixties, although unlike the former Manchester South District Railway which ran along the north bank of the Mersey into the town the new track will now cross the river at some point, most likely from Heaton Mersey to Edgeley, passing close to the planned station at the eastern end of Cheadle village which should also be running passenger services by then.

That bridge will no doubt be the trickiest part of the project, work on which is due to start in 2027 and be completed by 2032. Will Stockport still be the new Berlin by then? Who knows, but hopefully I'll be around to see it and finally get to board a Stockport bound tram one day in the next decade or so.

Agatha at Abney

I had a stroll around Abney Hall Country Park in Cheadle the other day after seeing a BBC documentary about Agatha Christie in which Lucy Worsley also visited it.

Abney Hall was built in the mid nineteenth century by businessman James Watts, who owned a large warehouse on Portland Street in Manchester, around the time he became mayor of the city (a Hydes pub a few hundred yards south of it in Cheadle village is now named after him). Agatha Christie's older sister married his grandson, also called James Watts, and as a child in the early twentieth century she spent a lot of time there, eventually writing one of her first books while stopping for Christmas at the hall, which became a model for country houses in her subsequent detective novels. It was also where she retreated in the mid twenties after the episode in which she went missing as her first marriage broke down and was found at a Harrogate hotel having suffered some kind of memory loss, and from where she set out with her sister in law to a furniture sale in Marple, inspiring the name of her elderly female detective.

One thing I hadn't thought about before seeing the documentary was how close the railway line runs to the grounds of the hall, something which features in her novel 4.50 from Paddington. Cheadle station, where Agatha's family would have alighted on trips north from their home in Torquay, shut towards the end of World War I, although the junction where it stood in the early twentieth century still looks very similar and there are now plans to build a new station at the same location. 

Winter Warmer Wanderings

I completed Winter Warmer Wander, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA's annual celebration of strong ales, stouts and festive beers, somewhat ahead of schedule this year, three weeks before the end of the event, which runs from mid November to late December, consists of collecting stickers from pubs to win prizes, and is sponsored by Stockport family brewery Robinson's, who are also celebrating the 125th anniversary of their strong ale Old Tom.

I went to twelve pubs (four in Manchester, four in Cheadle Hulme, two in Cheadle and two in Stockport), about half of them tied houses of local family breweries (Holt's, Lees, Robinson's) and the rest a mixture of micropubs and free houses selling beers from further afield, mostly those of North Midlands breweries Thornbridge and Titanic. 

I drank more stouts than strong ales, almost all in halves due to their strength and price, although the latter were amongst my favourite beers on this year's event. I managed to call at some regular haunts, the Chiverton Tap next to Cheadle Hulme station and the City Arms in Manchester city centre, but also revisited a few pubs I probably wouldn't have gone to otherwise, including the surprisingly pubby Red Lion in Cheadle and the Pointing Dog in Cheadle Hulme, a far flung spot on the southern border of Stockport for most participants on the event, but fortunately only a couple of miles walk for me.

A Chilled Call At the Guildhall

I popped to the trade session of Stockport Beer and Cider Festival yesterday afternoon.

With Stockport County now a Football League club again, and looking to redevelop their ground as they seek further promotions, it hadn't been possible to reach an agreement to hire Edgeley Park, the festival's home for the past couple of decades, so a move away from it was forced upon the organisers, to the Guildhall on Wellington Road where it was last held thirty or so years ago.

I'd seen a bit of chat online about potential crowd issues at the smaller venue, and also felt slightly uneasy as both a Catholic and lefty at entering a Masonic building for the first time, but the rooms were surprisingly spacious, with a large outdoor area and marquee also to the rear, and little evidence of secret rites about the place.

I drank a pale ale, porters and mild from local breweries Beartown, Runaway and Stockport Brewing, and also picked up a few of my favourites from Fuller's and Schlenkerla at the bottled beer bar.

I expect that the festival will return to Edgeley Park next summer once financial terms have been agreed with Stockport County, but with its more intimate and laid back atmosphere this venue made for an enjoyable interlude this year.

Mild thing

Being the first of three Bank Holiday Mondays in May, thanks to the coronation of King Charles next weekend, I set out yesterday afternoon to complete Mild Magic, the annual event organised by my local CAMRA branch to promote mild ale, with a bit of a crawl around some south Manchester pubs.

Across the month it took me, I visited thirteen participating pubs and drank mild in nine of them (in the other four, mild was unavailable in two and undrinkable and returned in two, and either substituted with or changed for bitter or stout).

Five of the pubs where I drank mild were tied houses (1 Holt's, 3 Hydes, the sponsors of the event, and 1 Wetherspoons, all serving dark milds), three micropubs (2 light and 1 dark mild), and one a social club in a former pub (another dark mild). Seven of the pubs were in Manchester and two in Stockport.

I voted for the Cross Keys in Adswood as the best pub I visited, and Thirst Class Sweet Mild O' Mine as the best beer I drank.

After completing my sticker card at Reasons To Be Cheerful in Burnage, I continued to Ladybarn Social Club, where I received a very friendly welcome from the staff there (it's the local CAMRA Club of the Year, and has some interesting architectural features). It was the first time I'd been to either, and, as on another occasion in south Manchester a few years ago, made for a contrast between a young hipsterish bar and a more traditional drinking establishment.

Runaway to the Riverbank

Before a CAMRA pub crawl around central Stockport last night, I popped into the town's newest brewery, Runaway, which relocated there a few months back from Dantzic Street on the edge of Manchester's Northern Quarter and opened their bar to the public a week ago (I'm not sure where the name comes from: maybe it's a tribute to Del Shannon's 1961 hit whose line "I'm a-walkin' in the rain" is equally applicable to Manchester and Stockport).

Their new place is pretty much what you'd expect from a modern brewery taproom in a converted industrial building: stainless steel vessels, wooden tables in a bright, airy space with lots of natural light from the large windows and a mostly keg lineup on the bar along with a couple of cask lines. There's a bottle shop you can stock up at and plenty of outside seating in the courtyard beer garden, where the young, hipsterish crowd was enjoying pizzas from a wood fired oven. On the banks of the Mersey, it's just upstream from the town's famous railway viaduct, next to the the new bridge over the river which I hadn't been across before, and from where you get a panoramic view of the town centre.

Stockport might not be the new Berlin, but with more residential and retail development on the way, and transport improvements that will hopefully include the Metrolink tram system reaching it at some point, that side of the town is certainly being transformed rapidly, and will soon be unrecognisable from the scene once viewed and described disparagingly by a German communist travelling above it across the railway viaduct.

Golden Pints 2022

Having read Boak and Bailey's, I was inspired to put together my own list of favourite beery things from 2022. I like the subtitle of their post, "notes on an almost normal year": despite the final Covid restrictions being lifted at the end of January, it's been another tough year for the beer industry as soaring energy prices and other rising costs have seen pubs and breweries shut and drinkers' pockets hit.

Looking back at the first time I did this in 2013, and the last in 2017, I saw how little some of my answers have changed in the last decade. I'm not sure if that indicates a reassuring adherence to tradition, or a worrying failure to explore new things...

Pub 

I've only been to half a dozen pubs this year, mostly my local – either side of yet another refurbishment by Holt's in November – and a few other food-led places within walking distance, including on a CAMRA crawl in July which also saw my first visit to a newish micropub, as well as a couple of multi-cask specialist free houses in Stockport, the Magnet, where I spent a memorable afternoon in September, and the one I'm going to give the prize to, Ye Olde Vic in Edgeley, whose twenty-one years in the Good Beer Guide we celebrated in August.

Draught beer 

Holt's Bitter: despite progressively wrecking my local in the last twenty years, the north Manchester brewery still produces a top cask pint.

Bottled beer 

Fuller's 1845 is still my favourite British bottled beer. I've also enjoyed a few bottles of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout and Schlenkerla Rauchmärzen.

Festival

I only went to one, Stockport in June, the last at Edgeley Park, at least for now, before the move to the Masonic Hall in 2023.

Blog 

I've read two pretty much every day, Ron Pattinson's Shut Up About Barclay Perkins and Retired Martin, whose posts from the Rhineland I particularly enjoyed, as well as BRAPA, Boak and Bailey, Paul Bailey, Pub Curmudgeon, Tandleman and Zythophile as they published on theirs. Cooking Lager deserves a special mention for this post about the pubs of Reddish.

The Queen in Stockport

I happened to be in a pub in Stockport, meeting up with a few mates who I hadn't seen for a couple of years because of Covid, when the news came that the Queen had died, almost a fortnight ago now.

I knew when I left home to catch the train to Stockport that the Queen was seriously ill and that it was possible she might die in the next few hours, and wondered what would happen if she did – would the pub shut, or people sit silently over their drinks in a mournful atmosphere? – but in the end a bloke at the bar asked his mate if he thought they'd get the day off for the funeral and they laughed and things carried on pretty much as normal. Later, we walked back down the hill to the station and there were groups of people coming along Wellington Road in high spirits on an evening out, which would have been unthinkable seventy years ago I reckon.

Funnily enough, the only time I saw the Queen, quite by accident, was at Stockport station in 2004, when I was dropping some relatives off there and her train came in on the next platform - she was on her way to what was then the Royal Manchester School for the Deaf, and I to work as one of her civil servants at the social security office across the road, where, given my republican sympathies, the telling of my encounter with our employer was met with some mirth.

I'd travelled into Stockport on the train a couple of times before in the last few months, for the beer festival at the football ground and the evening at Ye Olde Vic to celebrate it having been in the Good Beer Guide for 21 years, but on both occasions had left the station by the approach on the Edgeley side, so hadn't seen the new buildings around it or the bus interchange going up in the shell of the old one.

Ye Olde Vic: 21 not out

I went to Ye Olde Vic in Edgeley last night, for an evening on which Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA celebrated it having been in the Good Beer Guide for 21 years in a row.

As I wrote here, after my first visit to it in 2015, for years I thought that when people talked about the derelict looking pub at the top of the approach behind Stockport station, they were referring to the imposing, but long closed, and now converted for other use, Blue Bell Hotel rather than Ye Olde Vic just down the hill.

It's actually only a few weeks since my last visit, having popped in for a pint en route to the station after Stockport Beer and Cider Festival at Edgeley Park, and its unique atmosphere of a street corner local largely frequented by regulars rather than destination pub visitors cum eclectic bric-à-brac emporium and the well-kept cask beer which has led to it long appearing in the Good Beer Guide were the same on both occasions.

Another draw last night was the presence on the bar of Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby Mild, the strong mild ale created by a widow of that name in 1921 that disappeared for thirty years until the recipe for it was rediscovered by her grandson in the late 80s, which, combined with a cheese and onion cob in its home at the Beacon Hotel, Sedgley, was one of the highlights of my holiday to the Black Country a decade ago.

Another look at the Moss Nook and Heald Green pub scene

The first local CAMRA event cancelled at the start of lockdown in March 2020 was a pub crawl around Moss Nook and Heald Green; on Friday night, more than two years behind schedule, it finally happened.

The record breaking temperatures at the start of the week had thankfully been replaced by the overcast skies and light drizzle more normal for Manchester, making for a pleasant mile and a half stroll around this mostly residential suburban area at the edge of the airport and Cheshire countryside, extending along the southern border of the city and into the neighbouring borough of Stockport.

With the original starting point, Robinson’s Tatton Arms, closed for refurbishment, four of us assembled at the nearby Flying Horse, a chain dining pub which opened at the end of 2013. A pump-clip for Greene King IPA greeted us on the bar, but it turned out not to be available, and with our next call at the Heald Green Hotel (an inter-war Whitbread pub, and keg-only haunt of mine when I was a teenager in the late eighties) equally brief – a plastic pint pot atop the single hand-pump for Doom Bar signalled its unavailability, gruffly confirmed by the barman – after fifteen minutes we’d been to two pubs without drinking a drop of beer – as someone said, the evening was becoming less of a pub crawl and more like a Temperance tour!

Luckily, Brew HG, a café/bar in a former florist’s shop on the other side of the railway station, gave us a friendly welcome, seats at a table outside and a craft beer menu that included a few Belgian bottle-conditioned strong ales – it could almost have been Brussels if it hadn’t been for the aircraft about to land at the airport descending overhead; they also had German lagers and wheat beers in bottles and Beavertown Neck Oil IPA on draught at the bar. One to return to I think.

Having phoned ahead to confirm its availability, we were assured of cask beer in the form of freshly pulled through Doom Bar at the Cheadle Royal, a modern, low-rise building on a business park at the opposite end of the village, with which it shares its name as well as with the adjacent Victorian psychiatric hospital.

Our final call was at the Griffin, my local in the nineties and early noughties, when it was a typically squat, and smoky, sixties-built estate pub, since transformed by Holt’s into an airy food-led place once described as looking like Southfork Ranch, where we found their bitter in good condition, an upbeat end to an evening which had begun with an inauspicious series of swift retreats before improving in both hospitability and beer quality.

Stockport(er) in the sunshine

After a three year break because of Covid, Stockport Beer and Cider Festival kicked off at Edgeley Park football ground with a trade session yesterday afternoon.

A couple of things had changed since my last visit to the home of the Hatters back in the summer of 2019: Stockport County are now a Football League club again, and the Cheadle End where the festival is held has been redeveloped, although the concourse under the stand where the bars are wasn't as different as I'd expected.

I drank mostly darker, stronger beers - Kirkstall X Mild, based on a recipe from 1885, Redwillow Heritage Porter and Stockport Stock Porter - as well as Kerala IPA from the former Howard Town, now Distant Hills Brewery, in Glossop. I also popped to the bottled beer bar in one of the function rooms at the top of the stand, whose temporary licence now allows off sales, and picked up a couple of my favourite smoked German lager Schlenkerla.

On the way back to the station we popped into the Olde Vic, somewhere else I hadn't been to for a few years, and had a pint in the beer garden there. One of Stockport's first freehouses and a longtime Good Beer Guide pub, it seemed to be doing a decent post-festival trade.

 

Only Connect

Since the start of the first lockdown in the spring of 2020, I've contributed a few bits and pieces to a local history website. One of the things that has emerged from the discussions on the Facebook page related to it is the link between farming in the area and the Stockport brewery Robinson's.

William Robinson was born in Northenden, then a farming village on the southern bank of the Mersey in north Cheshire, in 1800. In 1838, he bought the Unicorn Inn, built on Lower Hillgate, Stockport, in 1722, which he'd been landlord of since 1826. He left the pub in the hands of his son George in the mid eighteen forties, after the death of his first wife, remarried and moved to High Grove Farm in Heald Green, where he owned 41 acres (see the 1841 tithe map and 1851 census below). George brewed the first Robinson's beer in the backyard of the Unicorn in 1849 and became the licensee in 1850, relinquishing it in 1859 when his younger brother Frederic took over. The pub closed at the end of 1935 and was then demolished to make way for an extension of the brewery, with a plaque now marking the spot on the wall of the brewery yard (let's hope it survives the upcoming sale of the site when brewing moves to Robinson's bottling and canning plant in Bredbury).

There is still a Robinson's Farm in the Heald Green area, although I don't know if it's linked to the William Robinson who started the Stockport pub and brewing company in the late eighteen thirties and farmed here in the eighteen forties and fifties.  I suppose we shouldn't be surprised by the connection between farming and brewing given that the process begins by mashing malted barley.

Census returns from The History of Robinson's Brewery by Dr Lynn F. Pearson, 1997

RIP Railway

As expected, and widely predicted by the local media, the planning committee of Stockport council yesterday granted permission for the Railway pub in Portwood, on the eastern edge of the town centre, to be demolished to make way for a retail development.

The Railway, whose name comes from the line that once ran behind it, which closed to passenger trains in the late sixties before being buried beneath a motorway, was the scene of many CAMRA events, the recipient of numerous awards and the start or end point of several pub crawls, and the local branch made a forceful, if sadly ultimately unsuccessful, submission to the planning committee objecting to the application in an attempt to save it. It has been known for selling stronger and darker beers and real cider, and was a regular participant in the Winter Warmer Wander, Mild Magic and Cider Circuit promotions to showcase those styles. It was also a favourite of the Good Beer Guide pub ticker and blogger Simon Everitt when some of us took him around the town a couple of years ago. 

The pub's owners seem to have taken advantage of certain aspects of planning law to obtain the council's permission for demolition to take place: relying on an application made and granted in 2005, on which minimal work was subsequently done, and citing the disrepair that the building has been allowed to slip into it, so that it is now allegedly unsafe and impossible, or rather uneconomic, to save it.

In the Railway with fellow CAMRA members and bloggers, October 2019 (photo by Simon Everitt from his BRAPA blog)

Beer in the Millennium Year

A post about Boddingtons Strong Ale on Ron Pattinson's blog Shut Up About Barclay Perkins the other day had me looking through my collection of Good Beer Guides, and noticing a gap - the first one I've got is from 1976, then the ones published in 1983 and 1990, but after that nothing until the 2011 edition, so I put that right by buying a cheap secondhand copy of the 2001 one online. So how do pubs in the Manchester area compare now to back then in the first year of this millennium nearly twenty years on?

Of the pubs in Manchester city centre, most are still there - the Britons Protection, Castle, Circus, City Arms, Grey Horse, Hare and Hounds, Jolly Angler and Old Monkey - but further out a few cask outlets in the 2001 GBG have gone, including the Sir Edwin Chadwick, a Wetherspoons in Longsight ("Comfy chairs near the door are appreciated by older customers") that I can't say I remember, and which was apparently quite short-lived, and the Albert in Rusholme, a genuine rather than plastic Irish pub, with an Irish landlord and regulars, which I drank in quite a bit at the time and which served a decent pint of Hydes bitter, from their then brewery not far away in Moss Side (round which it occasionally organised tours). It went downhill after Manchester City moved from nearby Maine Road to the City of Manchester Stadium in east Manchester in 2003 and the landlord retired to Australia, and became keg-only, but seems to have regained its popularity since.

In Stockport, the Armoury, Blossoms, Red Bull and Swan With Two Necks are thankfully still with us, but a couple of pubs that I never made it to, Robinson's brewery tap the Spread Eagle on Lower Hillgate and the Olde Woolpack near the Pyramid office building, have shut (the latter only fairly recently), as has the Tiviot which I drank in once or twice in its final days, when it had steel poles supporting the roof ahead of the long-serving licensees retiring from the trade.

That Was The Winter Warmer Wander That Was

I've just completed another Winter Warmer Wander, the annual celebration of strong ales and stouts organised by my local CAMRA branch, Stockport and South Manchester, so here are my scores on the doors:

Beer style

7 stouts, 2 strong ales (both Robinson's Old Tom), 3 premium beers (strong bitters, milds and brown ales over 4.5% abv where the pub didn't have another qualifying beer).

Pubs

Stockport 6, Cheadle 3, Manchester 2, Cheadle Hulme 1.

Breweries

5 beers from regional brewers (Hydes 1, Robinson's 4), 7 from micros (4 from the North West - Cheadle, Dunham, 2 from Thirst Class - and 3 from the rest of the North/north Midlands: Elland, Little Critters, Titanic).

Price

Cheapest pint £1.95 (in Cheadle!), dearest a fiver, in Manchester city centre.

Favourite beers/pubs

Stout: Elland 1872 Porter in the Petersgate Tap, Stockport.

Strong ale: Robinson's Old Tom in the Bakers Vaults, Stockport (our local CAMRA Pub of the Year for 2019).

Pub: Britons Protection, the new home of Manchester Jazz Society, for its historic, multi-roomed interior and range of well-kept cask beers; runner-up, its sister pub, the City Arms, which had two cask stouts on the bar.

Sponsors of this year's Winter Warmer Wander

Warming up for another Winter Wander

With chill winds beginning to blow as we approach the back end of 2019, it's now only a fortnight until the start of the Winter Warmer Wander, Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA's annual celebration of strong ales and stouts. And with even more pubs and bars signed up for this year's event, including a few new places which have opened in the last twelve months, it's easier than ever to take part.

On a pub crawl around Stockport town centre last Saturday with fellow blogger BRAPA, it was noticeable that nearly all the ones we went to had a dark and/or strong cask beer on the bar, as befits the season, although to be honest I'm happy to drink these kinds of ales and stouts at any time of the year. 

I'm yet to drink a half or two of this year's Old Tom, the strong ale from Stockport brewery Robinson's which only appears on draught in their pubs in the winter, but I'm sure that I'll put that right in the next few weeks.

A class glass

I've finally got round to buying some lantern pint pots, the ten-sided, handled beer glasses that were standard in pubs throughout the thirties and forties, but stopped being manufactured some time in the sixties, until Stockport-based glassware suppliers Stephenson's started importing them a couple of years ago from China (Martyn Cornell on his Zythophile blog has a, typically thoroughly researched, history of their creation and resurrection).

I reckon this is the fifth type of pint glass I've drunk from or owned: nonics and tulips, which were standard in the late eighties and early nineties when I started drinking in pubs, conicals, which you can pick up at most beer festivals, dimpled jugs with handles, which I've got in both pint and half pint form ("borrowed" by relatives from south Manchester pubs in the sixties), and now lantern glasses, which can be seen in a Lancashire pub in this clip from the 1945 documentary Down At the Local that's included in the British Film Institute DVD Roll Out the Barrel.

I don't expect the lantern to become again the standard pint pot it once was, or as they appear to be in this advert for them, but it'd be good if they came back as a niche glass in more specialist beer houses.

As I washed and dried my new beer glasses, I thought of my grandmother, who worked as a barmaid in Threlfalls pubs in Wigan and Stretford in the thirties, and who must have done the same thousands of times.

In and Out of Some Stockport Pubs

The chairman of Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA John Clarke is putting together a list of pubs which have closed in the branch area since it was formed in 1974.

As part of the discussion around that, someone mentioned a book I hadn't heard of before, The Inns and Outs of Stockport Taverns by Coral Dranfield, so I got myself a copy of it.

Since the book's publication in 2011, quite a few of the historic pubs it lists have closed, including the Florist, Shaw Heath, the Flying Dutchman, Higher Hillgate, the Waterloo just off it, the George, Wellington Road North, and Winters, Little Underbank; one, the Pack Horse/Cocked Hat, has shut and then re-opened, whilst another, and possibly the oldest of them all, the Angel Inn on the Market Place, has recently reverted to being a pub, having shut as one in the early 50s.

Although I've been on guided walks and cellar tours around them, I didn't know that the Bakers Vaults and Boars Head on the Market Place once had, respectively, marines billetted with them or a pole in the bar where you could tie up your pig, or that the steps next to the Queen's Head on Little Underbank used to be closed one day a year to stop a public right of way being created there. I also didn't know that the Blossoms in Heaviley used to be called the Wellington Arms, or that the now closed Wellington Inn (also known as the Ups and Downs because the upper half was above the elevated Wellington Road South and the lower half beneath it, close to Mersey Square) was originally called the Wellington Bridge Inn to avoid confusion with the former.

Stockport's obsession with the  Anglo-Irish general and politician (I once worked for the civil service at Apsley House on Wellington Road North, next to Wellesley House, before transferring to Heron House on Wellington Street, just off Wellington Road South, and round the corner from the Waterloo) continues with the Wellington Free House, which opened last year a bit further up the A6. We once had a works Christmas do at the White Lion, also now closed, another contender for Stockport's oldest pub.