The bottom end of Bridgeman Street pictured in May
2012 (copyright Google Street View). The boarded-up Church Hotel is on the
left. Station Street is on the left-hand side of the street running across the
picture, Moncrieffe Street runs to the right. The Albion Hotel was actually
situated on the other side of the role on the corner of a very brief continuation
of Bridgeman Street, with the railway line running behind it.
This isn’t the Albion Hotel on Moor Lane. That’s
very much alive and well, thankfully – this is another Albion, a long-lost pub once situated at the very bottom of Bridgeman Street, and although both pubs date back to
around the middle of the nineteenth century by the dawn of the
twentieth-century only the Moor Lane Albion remained.
Bridgeman Street was once said to be the longest
street in Bolton. Initially it ran from Bradford Street all the way up to High
Street and was later extended even further up to Adelaide Street.
In 1838 Bridgeman Street was affected by the opening
of the Manchester to Bolton railway. This involved digging a huge ditch to accommodate
the new rail tracks with Bridgeman Street carried over the line by means of a
bridge.
By 1849 the Albion Hotel was in existence as a
public house – not a beer house - at the corner of Bridgeman Street and Station
Street, a street that still exists to this day. Station Street ran down the side
of the old Trinity Station building for just a few yards until it met
Moncrieffe Street outside the Church Hotel, but when the old station building
was pulled down in 1987 Station Street was truncated just a few yards where it
met the main carriageway.
The Albion’s existence became a little more
precarious in 1884 when Bridgeman Street bridge was pulled down and the street
split into two: the original Bridgeman Street, which ends where it meets Crook
Street with the Church Hotel on the corner, and Lower Bridgeman Street which
runs on the other side of the railway line.
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