Sun Inn, 54 Bradshawgate

Primark's Bolton store in the Crompton Place shopping centre is the building that replaced the building that replaced the Sun Inn.

The Sun Inn on Bradshawgate dated back to at least the 18^th century. James Best was shown as the pub’s landlord on the 1778 list of Great Bolton Alehouses.

Friendly societies often met at pubs and by 1820 the Foresters were meeting at the Sun Inn. [1]

The pub was nicknamed Loader’s Vaults after its owner, John Loader. [2] A number of licensed premises were owned by wine and spirit merchants and it was common practise to nickname such pubs after their owners.

Loader, a native of Henley-on-Thames, was the owner of the Sun Inn in 1832. In that year he buried his wife, Mary Anne, at the young age of 29 but five years later, John married Elizabeth Wrigley who came from a family of Manchester pub owners and spirit merchants. The two families were further entwined a few years later in 1839 when one of John’s relatives, Ellen Loader, married another member of the Manchester family, pub landlord John Wrigley.

Not only did the Sun stock wines and spirits, but it brewed its own beer and in the 1871 Bolton Directory, Elizabeth Loader is described as both a brewery and a wine and spirit merchant. John Loader had died in 1863 and the running of both the Sun Inn and the wine and spirits business was being undertaken by the couple’s eldest surviving son, Charles Price Loader (a number of John and Elizabeth’s children had died in infancy). He was listed as living at the pub while the rest of the family lived on Manchester Road.

Sadly, Charles died on 25 March 1879 at his home, 8a Boden Place, Manchester Road. His eldest son, three-year-old Ernest Charles Loader, also died at the same time in what seems to have been a tragic accident. But the incident effectively marked the end for the Loader family's connection with the Sun Inn.

Charles’ wife, Ada King Loader, sold the Sun Inn and the drinks business to another local wine and spirit merchant, Ross Munro and Co. But the decision was contested by other members of the Loader family who felt that, by rights, the business should have passed to the next eldest son Leopold Cooper Loader. In 1883, solicitors acting on behalf of the six-year-old Leopold ued Ada and her new husband, Thomas Daniel, a Mancunian she married in 1881,  but the action failed.

Thomas Daniel died in 1901, the couple having had two children. Ada was in St Annes-on-Sea in 1911, but she left for South Africa a few years later and she died in Cape Town in 1925.

As for the Sun, it closed in 1905. The council had plans to widen Bradshawgate and wanted to demolish properties on the west side of the street from the junction with Deansgate down to Nelson Square. But while a number of nearby pubs such as the Saddle and the Fleece were re-built on the new street, Ross, Munro and Co took the money and ran.

The Sun was demolished in 1906 to make way for a row of shops. The building that replaced it was demolished in the late-sixties to make way for the Arndale Centre.  The site of the Sun is the front of the Primark store on Bradshawgate, or to be more accurate the pavement the front of the shop is given that the street was widened over a hundred years ago.

[1] Leisure In Bolton, 1750-1900, Robert Poole, 1982

[2] Bolton Pubs 1800 – 2000, by Gordon Readyhough, Published by Neil Richardson, 2000.