The Church Hotel photographed in March 2011. Copyright Lost
Pubs Of Bolton.
The Church Hotel was situated on Crook Street at the
junction of Moncrieffe Street and was built in the 1830s, soon after the
consecration of the nearby Holy Trinity Church.
It became a Tong’s pub late in the nineteenth century before
being one of 21 pubs taken over by Walkers of Warrington when they bought out
Tong’s in 1923. It became a Tetley pub in 1960. [1]
During the seventies the Church gained a reputation for its
live entertainment. At that point cabaret artists were largely confined to
politically-affiliated clubs but the Church put on a number of top acts in a
smaller, pub setting.
By the early eighties the Church became a meeting point for
Bolton’s ‘New Romantics’ and later that same decade it became a gay pub after
the landlord and landlady of the Railway on Great Moor Street moved to the
Church.
Terry Whalebone took pictures of the Church in 2007 (see
here and here) but the pub closed a few years later and was sold in 2012 for conversion
into flats.
[1] Pubs Of Bolton 1800-2000, by Gordon Readyhough,
published by Neil Richardson (2000).
