Eagle And Child, Spring Gardens

Before the Civic Centre was built in the 1920s the local council had to clear away a whole swathe of buildings, many of which dated back to the late-eighteenth century. One of the buildings demolished was the Eagle and Child pub which used to stand on a site now covered by the old police station in Howell Croft North.

One street, Spring Gardens, disappeared completely, though curiously its back street, Back Spring Gardens, still exists. Despite its pleasant-sounding name Spring Gardens was anything but spring-like and by the early-twentieth century it certainly contained nothing like any gardens. The name was no doubt accurate in the eighteenth century but as this picture shows it was a rather grey-looking urban street by 1908.

The street did contain one pub, the Eagle and Child, which was situated towards the bottom end of the street, near to Queen Street. By the time it closed in 1906 the Eagle and Child was a Tong’s pub and there is one picture of it in the Bolton Museum collection, taken around 1900, a few years before it closed.

If you enlarge the above picture, the devil is in the detail. The Town Hall clock can clearly be seen in the distance but the street running outside the pub is Back Spring Gardens, whereas the pub’s address was Manchester Court, Spring Gardens which was on the other side of the pub as we look at it from this angle. Technically speaking, then, this is the back of the pub. Even so, it is fully-signed which suggests that the rear entrance was actually its main access. The building on the left in the foreground is the Queen Street Mission Ragged School, which was also demolished to make way for the Civic Centre, but which moved a couple of hundred yards down Deansgate to Central Street. Note the graffiti chalked on the walls, the landlord and landlady, Mr and Mrs Wood, standing resplendently in the doorway, Mr Wood smoking his pipe; their next door neighbour standing in her doorway and the two grinning characters hidden away at the right of the photograph, captured for posterity.

The pub’s name is another link with the Earls Of Derby, whose crest was an eagle and child.

The pub building stood for a number of years after it closed until it was demolished. Queen Street, then just a short thoroughfare off Deansgate, was extended to run all the way to Ashburner Street when the Civic Centre was built.

General Havelock, 110 Sidney Street

If there’s one type of pub that has pretty much disappeared over the past 20 years ago it is what was mistakenly referred to as the ‘back-street boozer’. That term was always a bit of a misnomer in Bolton where a back street is an alleyway between the backs of two separate rows of terraces and as such has no buildings of its own, but you get the idea.

So if we define a ‘back street’ – or more accurately a side street - as a street where you could conceivably throw down your jumpers for goalposts and have a game of footie, then what would you call a back/side street? Brownlow Way and Lever Street are both unclassified roads – no ‘A’ or ‘B’ numbers – but a game of football there is out of the question. The Howcroft is off the beaten track and so could conceivably be called a’back street’ boozer, as is the New Globe (the Rock, as was). The Portland up Halliwell was one of the last in that area and the General Havelock in Sidney Street definitely was one.

The network of streets bounded by Lever Street, Fletcher Street, Bridgeman Street and Thynne Street began to spring up in the first half of the nineteenth century as Bolton expanded out of the centre of the town and by the middle of that century streets such as Sidney Street, Coe Street and Foundry Street already existed, a mixture of industry, corner shops, housing and – inevitably – pubs.

The pub took its name from General Henry Havelock, who was notable for his recapture of Cawnpore during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Pubs and streets were named in his honour and its highly likely that the Bolton General Havelock was named at that time.

According to Gordon Readyhough’s book Bolton Pubs 1800-2000, the General Havelock was a brewhouse owned by Mrs Mahalah Hardcastle in the late nineteenth century. [1] Mrs Hardcastle sounds like a formidable woman and was certainly no slouch. She was born at a village near Bingley in Yorkshire in 1809 and along with her husband John ran the George Hotel in Bolton in the 1830s. Her husband’s family also ran the Boar’s Head on Churchgate for much of the first half of the nineteenth century. However, by 1851 she was a widow living at 13 Deansgate but she was described on that year’s census as a laundress and a brickmaker despite the address being that of the Old Woolpack. The brickmaking business employed eight men! By the 1860s she had the York Hotel on Newport Street. Later, she also took on the General Havelock. She also owned land in Shaw Street which she sold to the council in 1876 and she died in Bolton in 1881 aged 72, still the licensee of the York. Her son Walter was a decent cricketer who played a number of times at county level for Lancashire. [2]

In 1871 the General Havelock was owned by a Mr Joseph Haslam who regularly held the All-England Celery Show at the pub! [3]

The pub was later sold to the Openshaw Brewery of Manchester but that business was taken over in 1957 by the Hope & Anchor Brewery of Sheffield and the General Havelock was one of 125 pubs that formed part of the deal. Hope & Anchor was later sold to Bass and it was as a Bass pub in the seventies that the General Havelock made it into the Good Beer Guide. That it sold real ale at all was unusual enough for a Bass pub in Bolton in the seventies but by then the Sidney Street area had changed beyond all recognition compared to Mahalah Hardcastle’s day. The houses on Coe Street, York Street and Nile Street had all been demolished and replaced by industrial units and other ‘back street’ pubs in the area had also bitten the dust; pubs such as the York Street Tavern on York Street, the New Inn on Coe Street and the Bradford Arms on Foundry Street – all of which were demolished in the early sixties.

Bass decided to put the General Havelock up for sale and it was sold into the free trade in the summer of 1982. [4] I first went there later that year and found a pleasant pub with the bar on the left as you entered from Sidney Street and beers from Boddington’s and Timothy Taylor’s on sale, which made it of enough interest to want to return.

But as the eighties went on the pub continued to struggle. In early 1985 it was being reported that its owners, Columbia Leisure, had also bought Blighty’s nightclub in Farnworth and were planning to turn part of it into a ‘real ale fun bar,’ a plan that never came to pass. [5]

Gordon Readyhough says the pub closed in the 1980s. If it did it was at the end of that decade though I might suggest it remained open for a few years longer. I do remember one licensee getting into a dispute with the Havelock’s then owners and locking herself inside the pub, a fact reported at the time by the Bolton Evening News, and it closed not long afterwards. By then it did some decent business when Bolton Wanderers played at their Burnden Park home, but not much apart from that.

Today, there’s nothing left of the General Havelock. The distinctive white-washed pub was knocked down not long after it closed and as shown in the image above the site of the pub is now used as a lorry park for one of the businesses in Albion Mill next door. You wouldn’t know that a pub ever stood there.

A sketch of the pub and mill by local artist Roger Hampson was up for sale in October and may be seen here.

[1] Bolton Pubs, 1800-2000, by Gordon Readyhough (published by Neil Richardson, 2000)
[2] Cricket Archive. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
[3] St Mark’s website, David Dixon,  Retrieved 2 April 2011.
[4] What’s Doing, the Greater Manchester beer drinkers’ monthly magazine. August 1982.
[5] What’s Doing, February 1985.

Stanley Arms, 134 Derby Street

Site of the Stanley Arms, Derby Street in 2011

Although Derby Street and St Helens Road have been largely de-pubbed, particularly in the last 10 years, the latest wave of closures – which has seen the Pilkingon, the Railway, Farmers, the Albert, the Pike View and the Stags Head all close their doors – was not the first.

At one time from the Lido cinema on Bradshawgate up to the Stag’s Head on St Helens Road, there was something like 27 licensed premises; now there is just the Derby, the Oddfellows, Rumworth Hall and the Conservative Club. But there was an earlier wave that saw pubs like the Halfway House and the Lord Nelson close due to re-development in the late-sixties and early-seventies while across the road the Stanley Arms closed its doors in 1973.

The pub was earlier a beer house known as the Spinners and was owned by the Crown Brewery of Bury, which owned a number of other pubs in Bolton including the Man & Scythe.

Crown Brewery was taken over by Duttons brewery of Blackburn in 1959 and they were in turn taken over by Whitbread five years later. It was as a Whitbread pub that the Stanley ended its days.

Bolton’s association with the Earls of Derby is well-known and at times fractious as was shown by the dragging-out of one of the earls to the gallows in 1651 after his association with the massacring of a thousand or so of the town’s citizens in the Civil War a few years earlier.

However, the association still shows itself in the number of pubs given the family’s name – Stanley.

There have also been three pubs named the Stanley Arms in Bolton: one on Egyptian Street over near Blackburn Road; one on Chorley Old Road, which was later known as Sally Up Steps, and this one on Derby Street.

The Earl of Derby owned a lot of land in the Derby Street area and gave it its name and also the name of the council ward that it bore for many years.

Since its closure the Stanley Arms building has been used as commercial premises,and was most recently owned by a business dealing in signs, but a major refurbishment is currently taking place that has seen the inside of the building gutted and top storey almost removed.

The Stanley was situated on the corner of Derby Street and Rasbottom Street, between the former Pilkington Arms and the Derby Arms – or the Suraya, to give it its official name – which seems to have gone from pub to restaurant, back to pub.

Meanwhile, the former Pike View has become an outlet for Chunky Chicken, presumably another takeaway.

Grapes Hotel, Water Street

News of the £1 billion ‘Bolton Regeneration’ last weekend oddly made no mention of the Church Wharf Development which was put forward by Bolton Council as long ago as 2006. This plan, which was to develop the area of Bolton bounded by Manor Street, Folds Road and the River Croal, was put out to a ‘beauty contest’ in 2007 which was won by developers Bluemantle and Ask Developers. They proposed a £210 million “vibrant leisure zone providing restaurant and café bar units creating a destination for diners throughout the day and evening” as well as a “5/6 screen town centre cinema” and “a 126 bedroom hotel.” Outline planning permission was granted in September 2008 but the following month Ask and Bluemantle were asking for a bailout from the taxpayer and by March of last year the two were hoping to receive up to £10 million of public funds from the North West Regional Development Agency; but this was knocked back last summer.

As this photo shows looking down Brown Street the area doesn’t look that great at the moment so it was hardly surprising the council wanted to spruce it up, though it’s a sign of late ‘noughties’ thinking that the leisure industry was being looked at to replace the largely blue-collar industries in the area.

Diamond Glass Works occupy the old Well Street Mission building, Bolton Thai Boxing is further up Well Street and there are a few motor mechanics in the area, but have a look at the above photograph from 1937 [copyright Bolton Council]; taken from almost exactly the same spot as the photo above, there seems to be a vibrant community with shops, houses and a pub, the Grapes Hotel.

The area began to develop in the late-eighteenth century but the Grapes’ building has its own place in Bolton’s history, though from the days before its conversion into a public house. In 1818 a series of meetings were held at the premises of Robert Barlow, a wine and spirits merchant on Water Street. As a result, Bolton’s first bank – Hardcastle, Cross & Co - was set up in Mr Barlow’s premises, although by 1822 it was trading from a building in Market Street. [1]

Mr Barlow’s old premises became a beer house in the middle of the eighteenth century. It was situated on the corner of Water Street and Brown Street and in the 2011 photograph above it was roughly where the grass juts out opposite the first lamp post on the right.

This image, from 1885 and taken from Brown Street’s junction with Manor Street shows the Grapes in the distance with Taylor’s oil and paint store where the dental repair place now is, and the Dog & Partridge next door to that.

The Grapes was a Magee’s pub when it closed in 1952 at the start of a series of clearances that turned this community almost into a forgotten wasteland. In the early seventies the construction of St Peters Way and the Folds Road car park cut off the area from Mill Hill leaving Brown Street as pretty much the only way in or out.

It’s hard to say whether the Church Wharf development is dead now that the tax payer won’t be subsidising the project. It’s all gone quiet now, and maybe that’s to the relief of the businesses that survive in the area. Maybe we shouldn’t hold our breath.

[1] Royal Bank Of Scotland Heritage Archives.

Market Hotel (T'Crate Egg), Ashburner Street

The Market Hotel pictured in 1950. Image from the Bolton Library And Museums Service collection. Copyright Bolton Council.

The rather anonymous-looking wall seen on the photo at the bottom of the page  is something that thousands of Boltonians will pass everyday as they walk through the Newport Arcade on Newport Street, but it marks the spot of the Market Hotel (or T’Crate Egg, to give it its nickname) which was situated on the corner of what is now Ashburner Street and Coronation Street. It was a pub lost to the redevelopment of the west side of Newport Street in the late fifties.

This 1957 photo clearly shows Timpson’s shoe shop on Newport Street in the distance. In those days Ashburner Street was a thoroughfare that extended all the way down to Newport Street.

Although the Market was situated on the corner with Old Hall Street South no street by that name exists any more. In the 19th century Old Hall Street ran all the way from Deansgate to Great Moor Street but when the Town Hall was built in 1873 it carved the street in two. Old Hall Street North still exists; it’s the street just off Deansgate down the side of Whittakers that contains some ladies’ toilets and not much else.

The site of what was once Old Hall Street South is now Coronation Street which in those days ran parallel to Old Hall Street from the side of the Wheatsheaf Hotel to where it met Ashburner Street. When the shops on Newport Street were finally re-built in 1962, Coronation Street and Old Hall Street South were re-aligned to link together to form one continuous thoroughfare between Victoria Square and Great Moor Street.

In his book Bolton Pubs 1800-2000, Gordon Readyhough [1] reports that the Market was a beerhouse known in 1849 as the Goose With Two Necks and was later known as the Globe Vaults. It became the Market Hotel after Bolton’s wholesale market moved to Howell Croft South in 1871 and occupied the space where the Great Moor Street multi-storey car park now stands. One of the traders nearest to the pub dealt in eggs and the Market became known by the nickname ‘T’Crate Egg’ because of the habit of the trader to unload his crates of eggs by the pub door.

The pub received a full licence in 1879 when the Cross Axes on Wood Court off Deansgate (near the Old Three Crowns) closed down and licence was transferred to the Market.

When football became a professional game in the 1880s many Scottish footballers came south in search of paid football employment, but many had other jobs, often easy jobs in the mills owned by club officials but in 1886 the captain of Great Lever FC was one such Scot, Jimmy McKernan [2], a professional footballer but also making a living as landlord of the Market. The Great Lever club played on the Woodside Ground, situated on the site of what later became the Norweb offices near to Green Lane, and along with the likes of Halliwell FC and Bolton Wanderers were considered one of the major football forces in Lancashire at the time, competing in the FA Cup and supplying one player to the England team in 1883. However, with the advent of the Football League in 1888 and the Wanderers rise to pre-eminence the original Great Lever club faded away, although the name has recently been revived by a junior club.

By 1890 the Market was owned by John Atkinson & Co Ltd whose brewery stood on Commission Street in the area now covered by the new Sixth Form College. Atkinson’s sold out in 1895 to Boardman’s United Breweries of Manchester who in turn sold their breweries and pubs to another Manchester firm, Cornbrook’s in 1898 and it was as a Cornbrook pub that the Market ended its days.

The Market closed in February 1957 and prior to its demolition someone had the idea of taking photographs of the area as a record of how it looked prior to the area being redeveloped. To be honest, in these pictures the exterior of the pub was beginning to look a little bit run down but they give an idea of the Market Hotel and its immediate surroundings over 50 years ago.

A number of photos were taken of the pub in1957 but as the pub closed in February of that year some may well have been taken slightly before then.

You can see the photographs here, here, here here here here, and here.

Note the green sward of grass opposite the Market Hotel. Properties on this stretch were demolished in the late forties. The area was grassed over in 1950 and benches placed around the perimeter making a pleasant resting place for weary shoppers. By the time this aerial photo was taken in 1959
the grassed area was being used as a car park, an arrangement that lasted until the Octagon Theatre was built on the site in 1967, while the former car park in Howell Croft South was used as a bus station until buses moved to a redeveloped Moor Lane in 1969. As you can see the Market had been demolished along with all the surrounding property and work had commenced on redeveloping the area.

The wholesale market from which the pub took its final name moved from Howell Croft South to Ashburner Street in 1932, thus denying the pub some of its trade.



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

[2] Leisure In Bolton, 1750-1900, Robert Poole (1982)

Anchor Inn, Bury Old Road

The Anchor Inn, March 2011. Image copyright Lost Pubs Of Bolton.

A pub that quietly slipped off the scene in 2008 was the Anchor Inn on the corner of Eagle Street and Bury Old Road, which for the previous 25 years had operated as a free house.

Quite how long it was a pub isn’t known but the building is certainly shown on an 1848 map of Bolton. It may well have been a beer house which generally weren’t marked out on maps of the time.

According to Gordon Readyhough [1] the pub was once known as the Bright View until it became a Magee’s house and changed its name to the Anchor.

The Mill Hill area was a hive of industrial activity and there were numerous pubs between Bury Old Road and Folds Road, particularly along Mill Street and Mill Hill Street, both of which still stand. The Anchor was on the edge of the district and served a mix of industrial buildings and nearby housing in the Bury Road/Castle Street area.

After Magee’s were taken over it became a Greenall’s house and can be seen on this 1976 Bolton Evening News photograph. Note the cobbled streets and the old Bolton Parish Church school in the background (re-built nearby in Kestor Street the eighties).

Although much of the nearby heavy industry largely disappeared in the seventies and eighties there are still a number of offices and industrial units close to the Anchor. But, by the early eighties the Anchor, like a number of other pubs (e.g the Ancient Shepherd and the Alma) was surplus to Greenall’s requirements and it closed and remained empty for some time. However, it reopened in early-1983 [2] after being bought by the Mistry brothers who owned the Bantry club on Derby Street. This time it was run as a free house. Boddington’s beers were sold instead of Greenalls and there was an upturn in the pub’s fortunes. Boddies real ale was now on sale [3] at 53p for a pint of bitter, which was probably average for the time. Cask-conditioned Boddingtons Mild was soon added [4].

The Anchor was quite a pleasant pub, open-plan with a centrally-located bar on the left as you went through the Bury Old Road entrance, and a comfortable lounge ahead of you and to the right.

The pub later bought the adjoining fish and chip shop and opened it as the ‘Anchor Chippy’ serving the nearby industrial units.

The Anchor quietly closed in 2008 and is now known as the Anchor House. The Mistrys have got out of the licensed trade altogether and the old pub is now being run as office premises. Indian Karaoke is one of the businesses based there while the former chippy is now Mandy’s Pantry.

[1] The Pubs Of Bolton 1800-2000, Gordon Readyhough, published by Neil Richardson (2000)
[2] What’s Doing, the Greater Manchester beer drinkers monthly magazine, March 1983
[3] What’s Doing, May 1983
[4] What’s Doing, October 1983

A side view of the Anchor Inn in 2011 taken from Eagle Street and showing the anchor stone near to the top of the building.

Image copyright Lost Pubs Of Bolton.

Prince Rupert, Holmeswood Road

The Prince Rupert pictured in March 2011. Image copyright, Lost Pubs Of Bolton, 2011.

Lever Edge Lane was a small country lane that appears on maps in the mid-nineteenth century and probably existed before that. At the end of the 18th-century it is shown running all the way down to Manchester Road from Morris Green before part of it was named Green Lane (originally George Green Lane) during the 19th century.

Like most of the south side of Bolton, there were a number of mine workings in the area in the 19th century, with Lever Edge Colliery situated no more than about 100 yards away to the south of where the Prince Rupert was eventually built.

By the mid-thirties a row of terraced houses ran down one side of Lever Edge Lane from the Morris Green Lane end, but beyond that there were few houses other than the top of a row that ran back down Higher Swan Lane and Auberson Road, although the area towards Rishton Lane was a little more heavily populated.

The area between Morris Green Lane and Great Lever began to be populated from the 1930s onwards. By 1936 more houses were being built along Lever Edge Lane, effectively joining up developments at each end of the mile-long lane. A number of pre-fabricated houses were built on part of Lever Edge Lane and in the fifties the area to the south of the lane was heavily developed with the construction of the Orlit estate, and then Hayward Schools (now the Essa Academy).

Walker's brewery secured a plot for a new pub on Holmeswood Road which, although set back from what is now Lever Edge Lane, was part of the original trajectory of the road as this map shows. Walker's built and completed the pub in 1960 and named it the Prince Rupert. Although obtaining a licence to sell just beer was a little easier, all new pubs were obtaining full licences which meant they were able to sell wines and spirits as well. These were more difficult to obtain unless an existing licence was transferred from another pub. As a result the Prince Rupert obtained its licence from the Roebuck Hotel on Kay Street, which closed as the Prince Rupert opened.

The name itself probably came from a farm which stood in the area and which was named Prince Rupert Farm, although it appears as Lever Edge Farm on some maps. The farm stood next to where the pub was built on the site where Windsor Court now stands., although it was demolished in 1949 before the whole area was redeveloped.

Given Prince Rupert of the Rhine's part in the Storming of Bolton in 1644 in which at least 1000 Boltonians were massacred, it's hard to see why he should be commemorated in the naming of a farm, then a pub and also a street (the nearby Rupert Street). It's possible that detachments of Rupert's 3,000 men were camped in the Lever Edge area, though it is commonly held that they were camped on the site of the current Cannon Street, about a mile away. Although given that 3,000 men take up some considerable space it is entirely likely that on the night before the Storming of Bolton they were all over the moors to the south of the town. However, it is believed that the night before the storming, Prince Rupert lodged at the farm which subsequently took his name. [1]

The Rupert was a typical estate pub and, to be fair, it wasn't that bad for much of its existence. Architecturally, it was very much of its time and quite similar in some regards to the Morris Dancers, which was built the following year. Bizarrely, after previously being pub-free the Morris Green/Lever Edge area found itself with two new pubs opening in the space of 12 months.

A vestibule at the front offered access to toilets with a games room to the left and a smart lounge to the right. As there were no off-licences in the area at the time the pub was built there was also a room with a separate entrance that acted as the pub's 'off-sales' section. (Yates's Wine Lodge in town had something similar until a refurbishment in the early eighties). The pub was serviced by one long bar covering the lounge, the games room and the off-sales area.

Beer-wise the pub was typical of estate pubs in that it offered only keg beer – Double Diamond (remember that?) was the keg brand of Tetley's, who took Walker's shortly after the Prince Rupert opened. Not that real ale didn’t make an appearance – there were some enterprising landlords who gave it a go – I seem to remember Walkers Bitter appearing on hand pumps, it just didn't last long.

In effect this was a typical locals' pub, the centre of the community, with football teams and a number of ladies rounders teams based at the pub, but just as many estate communities have fallen on hard times, then so did the Prince Rupert. Towards the end it endured at least one period of closure in between licensees and despite the best efforts of some of those who took over the pub – leaflet drops, karaoke nights, discos – it fell a victim to changing social norms, cheap supermarket booze and the smoking ban. The final licensee saw out Christmas 2008 and a couple of days into 2009 the Prince Rupert closed its doors for the last time.

The pub was put up for sale but the chances of it ever re-opening as a pub again must be close to zero. In the two years since it closed it has been broken into on a number of occasions and the lead has apparently been stripped from the roof. It will be a surprise if the property is used again for any purpose, which is sad.

UPDATE: 28 March 2014. The Prince Rupert was bought for use as an Islamic education centre and opened as such in 2013 after a refurbishment.

[1] St Michael's Parish Church centenary pamphlet. 1951.

The Prince Rupert pictured in March 2011, two years after its closure. The small extension on the left-hand side was originally the off-sales counter with a separate entrance from the rest of the pub.

Image copyright, Lost Pubs Of Bolton, 2011.