Waterloo Hotel, 306 Waterloo Street

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The Waterloo pictured in the late-fifties. It was the last building on Waterloo Street with Blackburn Road going up the centre of the picture and Halliwell Road off to the left. 

The Waterloo Hotel – not to be confused with the Waterloo Tavern at the Folds Road end of Waterloo Street – opened in 1820 with Robert Brooks as its first landlord. The pub was situated on the corner of Waterloo Street and Blackburn Road though directories up to about the middle of the nineteenth century tend to give the address as Waterloo Place.

The pub was owned by the Manchester wine and spirit merchant Henry Carswell towards the end of the 19^th century, but it was later sold to Magee, Marshall and Co. [1]

The Waterloo closed in the late-sixties. The Bolton Evening News printed this picture in 1965 when it was announced that the pub would be demolished as part of a slum clearance. 

[1] Bolton Pubs 1800-2000, by Gordon Readyhough. Published by Neil Richardson.

A similar view to the above picture but taken in September 2014 (copyright Google Street View).

St James's Hotel, Buxton Street

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Buxton Street was a normal, working-class Bolton street. It ran off Calvin Street which was itself situated off Waterloo Street. Both streets still exist with Calvin Street now hosting the Royal Mail sorting office.

Buxton Street was only around 100 yards long. There were 38 buildings on the street in total. But you couldn’t get out of Buxton Street without passing a pub. At the Calvin Street end was the Buxton Arms, but at the other end – the Luther Street end – was the St James’s Tavern which we’ll deal with in this piece.

The St James’s Tavern dated back to 1870 and was named after the nearby St James The Apostle church and primary school. St James’s church was completed in 1867, though the size of the debt incurred in building the church meant that it wasn’t consecrated until 1871. [1] 

But just as the church was planned to serve the spiritual needs of growing industrial area, so the St James’s Tavern was instituted to satisfy needs of a different nature.

The first landlord was Charles Cordingley who appears as the licensee in the 1871 Bolton Directory. Cordingley grew up in Little Bolton, in Independent Street where Folds Road car park now is. By 1861 he was living at 15 Blackburn Road and working as a patternmaker. By 1864 he was a shopkeeper, again at 15 Blackburn Road, but by 1871 – still working as a patternmaker – he was running the St James’s beer house at 1-3 Buxton Street.

Charles later moved to the St George’s Hotel – perhaps he had a thing for pubs named after churches – but by 1883 he was dead at the age of just 59.

Magees later took over the St James’s and it was subsequently sold to Swales of Manchester. Now there was a brewery with reputation – and not a particular good reputation, either. Its beers were so bad it was known as ‘Swales swill’. The Lodge Bank Tavern and the Prince William were other examples of Swales' pubs.

Swales sold out to Boddingtons in 1971, but whether the customers of the St James’s Tavern got to taste any is open to question. The pub closed in the early-seventies and the whole area was cleared. While much of the area around Calvin Street and Waterloo Street has since been redeveloped with industrial units, there is a patch of land where Buxton Street once stood. A September 2014 view of the area is below (copyright Google Street View).

[1] Lancashire On-Line Parish Clerks project. Accessed 12 February 2015.

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

Waterloo Tavern, 197-199 Folds Road

The Waterloo Tavern pictured in the 1920s shortly after it had been taken over by Shaw’s of Leigh. Note the Shaw’s sign – bare on the 1976 photo (link here).

Not to be confused with the older and - it has to be said, grander - Waterloo Hotel at the other end of Waterloo Street, the Waterloo Tavern was a beer house on Folds Road at its junction with Waterloo Street.

It dated back to around the 1860s and Alexander Martin is shown as the landlord in the 1871 Bolton Directory. In the 1880s it was taken over by George Walker of the Park View Brewery on Spa Road and as the brewery changed ownership on a number of occasions over the years so did the pub and the rest of the brewery’s small tied estate. It became the Spa Wells Brewery in 1900 then James Jackson & Sons Ltd in 1904.

Jackson’s sold out to George Shaw & Co Ltd of Leigh in 1927; Shaw’s were bought by Walker Cain Ltd in 1931 and Walker’s merged with Tetley’s in 1961.

Like many pubs, the Waterloo was originally two dwelling houses that were knocked together and was numbered 197-199 Folds Road.

The end for the pub came in 1976. Many properties on Folds Road were knocked down in the sixties and seventies and the row containing the Waterloo, between Waterloo Street and Turton Street were among the last to be demolished.  

The pub can be seen here in a photograph from the Bolton Evening News of 15 September 1976  It’s the last property still occupied in a row of boarded up houses.

Below is a modern-day view from September 2014 (copyright Google Street View). The site once occupied by the Waterloo Tavern is now landscaped with the bottom of Waterloo Street closed off and traffic diverted to the bottom of Turton Street via Slater Lane. The pub was next to the footpath leading up Waterloo Street.

Great Eastern/Claremont Hotel, Waterloo Street

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The site of the Great Eastern pictured in September 2009 (copyright Google Street View) painted in green. In the mid-1990s it was a dark shade of blue. The pub stood on the corner of Calvin Street although in its previous incarnation as the Claremont Hotel it was situated across the road, where the back of the B&Q Superstore can be seen on the right-hand side of the photo. The whole of Waterloo Street was changing even before the Great Eastern closed in 1968. Car breakers now dominate one side of the street - scrapyards have been in the area for many years - while offices and retail outlets are on the other.  Indeed, the former Great Eastern premises probably challenges the Bolton Gate Company’s factory at the bottom of Waterloo Street as the oldest building left on the street.

The story of the Great Eastern on Waterloo Street is actually the story of two pubs.

The Claremont Hotel beerhouse – not to be confused with the pub of that name on Halliwell Road – existed for some years on Waterloo Street, possibly as early as the 1850s. However, in 1883 the owners decided to move from number 221 Waterloo Street to number 228, just across the road on the corner with Calvin Street. [1] A licence transfer application was put into the local magistrates and number 221 – the Claremont Hotel – closed as a pub and was converted into a private residence. The back of the Bolton branch of B&Q now stands on the site.

But instead of opening number 228 Waterloo Street as the ‘new Claremont Hotel’, the pub’s owners decided on a totally different name, the Great Eastern.

The new pub took its name from a ship, the SS Great Eastern, built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and, at the time of its launch in 1858, by far the biggest ship that had ever been built. By the 1880s, though, the SS Great Eastern was coming to the end of its life. It was reduced to acting as a giant advertising hoarding sailing up and down the Mersey advertising Lewis’s Liverpool department store and it was broken up towards the end of that decade - not long after its namesake pub opened in Bolton. Its flagpole was later bought by Liverpool FC to stand on top of the Kop end at their Anfield ground.

Bolton’s Great Eastern pub lasted a good deal longer. As long ago as the 1930s it was nicknamed ‘the Ship’ by locals as a nod to the type of vessel that gave it its name. [2] It was owned by John Halliwell & Son who operated from the Alexandra Brewery on Mount Street in Halliwell. In December 1910, Halliwell’s were bought by another local firm, Magee, Marshall & Co, who supplied the Great Eastern from its Cricket Street brewery on Daubhill until the pub closed in 1968.

The Great Eastern was sold off for use as offices. A firm of accountants occupied the building for a number of years but it is now used as offices for a nearby firm of car breakers.

[1] Bolton Pubs 1800-2000, by Gordon Readyhough. Published by Neil Richardson (2000).

[2] As noted by Mass Observation. See Ron Pattinson’s Barclay Perkins blog for more Bolton pub nicknames from the 1930s. 

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