The Queens Hotel pictured around 1964. Darley Street runs across the centre of this image from the Bolton Library and Museum collection (copyright Bolton Council). The photographer is standing at the top of Southern Street. On the other side of the junction, where the Ford Anglia car is parked in the distance, is Carlyle Street. The Woodman Inn can be seen almost directly behind the Queens. Behind the photographer would have been the Swiss Hotel – a nice little hat-trick of pubs in the space of around a hundred yards.
The Queens Hotel was situated on Darley Street at
the corner of Carlyle Street.
That part of Halliwell was built up in the 1870s
and 1880s with the streets named after popular historical and contemporary
literary figures such as George Darley, Thomas Carlyle, Homer and Virgil.
Tennyson Street was added around the turn of the 20th century.
Croft
Mills, Brownlow Mills and the Mortfield Bleachworks provided work for many of
the residents, and beer houses such as the Queens sprang up in the 1880s.
The Queens was bought by Magee, Marshalls and closed
around 1968. The whole of the area surrounding the pub was re-developed with the demolition
of housing that had been built little more than 80 years previously. New
housing was built in its place.
The image below is taken from roughly the same
position as the photograph at the top of the page. Kirkhope Drive was built on
the site of Southern Street. Carlyle Street has gone while the Croft Mills, out
of shot on the older picture and on the right-hand side of Carlyle Street as we
look, was demolished in the eighties.
