Rams Head, 2-4 Moss Street

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The Ram’s Head on Moss Street was another of those pubs that grew from a small corner shop into a beerhouse.

In 1861, George and Zilpah Davison lived at 2-4 Moss Street and are described in the census of that year as provision sellers. This was the typical corner shop; the first building on the right-hand side as you entered Moss Street, situated on the corner of Greenhalgh Street.

Ten years later and George Davision was now a shopkeeper and beer seller having paid the two guineas to turn his house into premises licensed to sell beer. His three children lived and worked with him, Zilpah having died in 1870. George gave up the pub business after just a few years and Daniel Farrington was the owner of the Ram’s Head by 1876. George went back to being a grocer, this time at a corner shop in nearby Bolton Street.

The Ram’s Head was later bought by Magees. Moss Street baths opened nearby in 1924, but ironically this development probably hindered the pub rather than helped it. In order to make room for the new baths, five rows of houses were demolished on Greenhalgh Street, Richmond Terrace and Richmond Place. That took out part of the Ram’s Head’s customer base, one that probably wasn’t replaced by a steady stream of potential customers coming from the baths.

The pub closed in 1939, but the building remained standing until the area around Moss Street was redeveloped in the sixties and early-seventies. The baths stood alone long after Moss Street was demolished, but they too fell victim to the bulldozer in the late eighties. A health centre was built on the site.