Crofters Hotel/Magees/Smudge's

The former Crofters Hotel pictured in April 2012. Copyright Google.

 The Crofters Arms at the junction of St George’s Road, Chorley New Road, Chorley Old Road and Chorley Street was initially licensed at the turn of the 19th century. At that time it was known as the Whitsters Arms, a whitster being another name for a crofter.

Until around 1907 the pub was a much smaller building and can be seen here in a photograph held by Bolton library and dated between 1895 and 1900. It had been owned by the Manchester Brewery Company since at least the 1870s and was subsequently acquired by Bolton Corporation before being sold on to local brewery Magee Marshall & Co. The pub was rebuilt in 1906/07 with Magees paying the council £500 and giving up the licence of the New Bridge Inn on Churchbank. [1]. The ‘MM & Co’ sign can still be seen near the roof of the pub [see picture here]

The Crofters remained in the company’s hands until it was taken over by Greenall Whitley in 1958. It was refurbished in 1983 with many of the old features of the pub being retained. The carved bar was turned round dividing the pub into two but with one large lounge replacing the old lounge and pool room. [2]

The pub was later known as Magees after its former owners but after a period of closure it re-opened as Gallaghers Oyster Bar. By March 2000 it was the Oystercatcher Brasserie before becoming the Conquistador tapas eaterie and then the Moghuls Palace Indian restaurant.

In 2009 the pub was taken over by Jane McDonald and Frank Smith, the then licensees of the Howcroft and the Roundhouse in Halliwell. Ms McDonald and Mr Smith evicted squatters who had taken up residence in the pub and spent around £30,000 in a refurbishment. The pub became known as Smudge’s – Mr Smith’s nickname. [3]

 Sadly, Frank Smith died in September 2010 and the pub closed shortly afterwards. The building is still up for sale though it is unlikely to be used again as a pub.

[1] Pubs Of Bolton 1800-2000 by Gordon Readyhough, published by Neil Richardson (2000).
[2] What’s Doing, the Greater Manchester Beer Drinkers monthly magazine, November 1983 issue.
[3] Bolton News, 14 September 2009. Retrieved 23 March 2014.

Ben Topp's/McGinlay's/Absolutely Fabulous

Two shots of the former Ben Topp's building. On the left a view taken in 2012 (copyright Google Street View). On the right an image of the building from the 1960s when it was still part of the nearby St George's church. For many years it was used as a school building. Photo from the Bolton Library and Museum Services collection.  Copyright Bolton Council. 



Ben Topp's opened at the top of Bath Street in 1986. The former St George’s school building, which since the early-eighties has backed onto Topp Way, was built in 1847 but was bought in 1981 by businessman Des Duxbury who wanted to turn it into a free house. A finance company backing the project stepped down so Tetley’s brewery stepped in with a free trade loan. [1].

 It was initially named after Ben Topp, which was something of an oddity as the prominent trade unionist Mr Topp is believed to have been teetotal. In 1986 the pub won an award from the Civic Trust, much to the puzzlement of the writer in local beer magazine What’s Doing [2], but the premises did nothing as a pub, probably as it was too far out of the town centre. Revellers weren’t likely to make a detour along St George’s Road on their way to the nightclub on Bridge Street (the old Palais building knows as Ikon, Ritzy and initially the Palais) and by 1988 it was up for sale for a price of £350,000.

In 1994 the then-Bolton Wanderers striker John McGinlay took over and turned it into a sports bar named McGinlay’s. That wasn’t as successful as McGinlay’s spell at the Wanderers and it later became a cabaret bar called Absolutely Fabulous before becoming a furniture showroom.

In 2009 the Bolton News reported plans for the building to be turned into a restaurant. Owner Clarence House Properties Ltd planned to add a number of one-bedroom apartments on the upper floors but went bust before the plans could come to fruition. The building remains empty.

[1] Bolton Beer Break, Summer 1988.
[2] What’s Doing, June 1986.
[3] Bolton News, 17 September 2009.

Here is a side view of the building taken at the same time as the image at the top of the page. Clarence Street can be seen tailing off into the distance. Clarence Street once linked Vernon Street with Kay Street but is now a fraction of its former length. Photo from the Bolton Library and Museum Services collection.  Copyright Bolton Council. 

Lodge Bank Tavern, Bridgeman Street

Lodge Bank Tavern pictured on 29 March 2011.
Copyright: Lost Pubs Of Bolton 2012

Every pub closure is disappointing as the fabric of our social history is wrapped up in these places. But one of the most disappointing came in August 2010 when the Lodge Bank Tavern closed its doors for the final time.

The Lodge Bank presumably took its name from the Great Bolton Reservoir No. 1 owned by the Bolton Free Waterworks which some 170 years ago occupied the area close to the pub from what is now Rothwell Street up towards the old railway line - part of which can still be seen – and up as far as Gregson Field. In other words a ‘lodge’ with a pub near the corner of one of its banks. Later in the nineteenth century the reservoir was filled in and the Bolton-Leigh railway re-routed from Daubhill into town to run under Heywood Park and land once occupied by the reservoir.

The Lodge Bank Tavern had its own brewery in the nineteenth century and was later owned by Samuel Smith whose brewery at the Dog and Snipe on Folds Road served a number of other of his pubs in Bolton (but who shouldn’t be confused with the Yorkshire brewery of the same name). [1]

Samuel Smith ceased trading in the thirties and the Lodge Bank was then bought by Swales Brewery of Manchester. That perhaps wasn’t so good for drinkers as Swales' beers didn't have a good name amongst many of its customers who nicknamed the brewery's products as ‘Swales Swill’ so it was perhaps a step in the right direction when Swales were taken over by another Manchester brewery, Boddington’s, in 1971.

Boddies in the seventies was the stuff of legend. It was an ‘acquired taste,’ somebody once said, which meant that it tasted different to Tetley Bitter, Double Diamond and Watney’s Red Barrel -it had a discernible taste for one thing - and the beers were as popular as Swales were reviled. It was certainly a far cry from the stuff Boddington’s subsequently brewed in the eighties and nineties which they dubbed ‘the cream of Manchester’. One tale often told was that in the seventies the brewery refused to supply their beers to a customer in the south of England on the grounds that it “didn’t travel well.”

In 1979 the Lodge Bank Tavern closed down and was sold to another family-owned brewer, John Willie Lees of Middleton Junction, to become their first pub in Bolton since the turn of the 20th century. Before the sale went through and the pub could re-open Lees had to get a compulsory purchase order rescinded [2]. The local authority were redeveloping the area and the adjoining properties up to Dalton's newsagent near old railway bridge on Bridgeman Street were all bought and torn down. The railways cuttings were subsequently filled in and Lees also bought some of the land next to the pub to build a beer garden.

By February 1980 the sale had gone through but it was another six months before the Lodge Bank re-opened as Lees decided to completely refurbish it. The re-fit wasn’t to everyone’s liking with one correspondent bemoaning the fact that the old Victorian bar had been ripped out along with windows displaying the pub’s name. When it reopened Mild was on sale at 37p a pint with Bitter at 38p. [3] It also opened with a full licence having been Bolton's last beerhouse. Beer houses were created in 1830 by an Act of Parliament which aimed to make the supply of beer easier and to bring down its price in an attempt to wean the populace off much stronger spirits, particularly gin. For the price of two guineas - £2.10 in today's money - anyone could open a beerhouse and Slater's Bolton Directory of 1843 lists over 300 such establishments in Bolton and district.

New toilets were fitted at the time of the 1980 refurb and a car park was added in 1988 [4]. By then the Lodge Bank was one of three pubs and a club within a hundred yards of each other on Bridgeman Street but first the Victoria went then Bradford Ward Labour Club went the way of so many of the politically-affiliated clubs when it was sold off for housing and finally the Lodge Bank itself closed in August 2010.

Shortly after its closure the pub was sold to Bolton Council and although furniture and bar fittings were stripped the building remained pretty much intact for the next four years. The reason the council bought the pub was as part of an extension to the nearby Clarendon Street school. All the land outside the old school down to the pub was to be bought and the school would either be extended or completely rebuilt. Included in the redevelopment was the old railway cutting right next to the school. But council officials reported in early 2011 that the cutting is full of contaminated material which would have to be treated before the land was built upon. Presumably because of the increased costs the purchase of other land and property was put on hold.

Eventually, the new Clarendon school was built on part of Bobby Heywood's Park across Bridgeman Street and opened in the summer of 2014. The old school burned down in mysterious circumstances shortly after, on 21 July that year.

Meanwhile, the Lodge Bank Tavern building was sold at auction in 2013. In 2014, planning permission was obtained to turn the former pub into two dwellings.

Directly opposite the Lodge Bank Tavern stands the Park Hotel,a 150-year-old pub that is now the great survivor of Bridgeman Street. The Railway, the Victoria, the Forge, the White House, the Farmers, the Lord Napier, the Oliver Cromwell, the Sir Sidney Smith, the Pineapple, the Oxnoble - this small, local’s boozer has seen them all off. It's the last of its kind on what was once a street of pubs.

[1] Bolton Pubs 1800 - 2000, Gordon Readyhough (published by Neil Richardson, 2000)
[2] What’s Doing, the Greater Manchester beer drinkers’ monthly magazine. February 1980.
[3] What's Doing. October 1980
[4] Bolton Beer Break. Summer 1988.

The former Lodge Bank Tavern pictured on 10 November 2014 (copyright Lost Pubs Of Bolton). The  pub building had just been gutted prior to its conversion into two dwellings.

Top Storey Club, Crown Street

Of all the pubs and clubs in Bolton the Top Storey club on Crown Street was one of the shortest-lived but was without a doubt the most tragic after 19 people lost their lives in a fire there 50 years ago today on 1 May 1961.

The club was situated in an old mill close to where the multi-story car park now stands and backed on to the open River Croal. It was opened in December 1960 by Mr Stanley Wilcock, who rented the building for his business, Gregg Construction Company, which made kitchen furniture on the lower floors.

Mr Wilcock had the idea of converting the top two floors into a nightclub but by March 1961 he had sold out to two Manchester businessmen, Denis Wilson and Richard Sorrensen ,although he continued to use the lower floors for the kitchen furniture business.

However, the owners of the building were concerned about the idea of a nightclub in the building having only learnt of its existence after seeing an advert in the Bolton Evening News. They considered that the building was unsuitable for licensed premises and at 10.35pm on Monday 1 May 1961 one of the building’s owners, Mr Norman Balshaw, went to the Top Storey club to give Wilson and Sorrensen notice that the club had to close and that they must be out by 24 June.

Mr Balshaw saw the two men in the club office on the ground floor and Wilson and Sorrensen then went upstairs to join the club’s customers.

The Top Storey club wasn’t particularly large and there can’t have been room for more than 100 people in there. On that Monday night, 1 May 1961, there can’t have been more than about 25 people in the club. The layout was just a few tables and chairs arranged down the two sides of the wall with a small space in the middle of the floor. Customers listened to tape recorded music or played on an elaborate one-armed bandit that was a feature of the club.

In 2001 one of the survivors of the fire, Jack Breen, told the Bolton Evening News that he was sitting at the end of the bar at about eleven o’clock with the club’s manager Bill Bohannon. Bill thought he could smell smoke and went down the rickety single flight of wooden steps that was the sole means of entry and exit at the club. When Mr Bohannon got to the ground floor he noticed smoke coming from under the door which led to the workshops.

He kicked in the door but found himself looking into a blazing inferno. He tried to get back upstairs, but was forced back by the intense heat. Upstairs, the first Jack Breen knew about it was when all the lights went out. There was then an explosion that took all the oxygen out of the room but he managed to make his way to a window that had been blown out by the explosion. He stood on the ledge but passed out and fell 80 feet. He woke up in Bolton Royal Infirmary with 20 per cent burns and a badly-damaged hand but he was one of the lucky ones. Nineteen people lost their lives in the fire, five from falls from the windows and 14 who died in the bar area.

Thomas Cardwell, a fireman on the scene that night, described the scene to the Bolton Evening News in 2001. When the fire brigade arrived they found their turntable ladders were too short to reach the top storey of the building.

"The screams just gradually faded away,” he told the paper.

"The building was full of smoke, more smoke than flames really by then, but it was still very warm. The staircase was completely gone and we had to put ladders up inside the building to get to the top floor."

He goes on to describe the scene in the club itself.

"There were bodies all piled up near the bar. No-one inside that room who had not jumped had lived.

"The bodies weren't very burned, though. They were just quite pink -- almost like they'd been on their holidays.

"But they were piled up in two areas, one with about three bodies and another of about 12. They had panicked when they couldn't get out and were just piled together, like a pack of cards."

Firemen from Horwich, Radcliffe and Leigh joined those from Bolton and it took two-and-a-half hours to get the fire under control. The body of one lad who leapt from the club into the River Croal was found downstream a mile away from the scene of the fire.

The club’s owners, Denis Wilson and Richard Sorrensen, were among the dead as was Sheila Bohannon, the wife of manager Bill Bohannon. It was later suggested that figures in the Manchester underworld had a grudge against Mr Sorrensen and were responsible for the fire though nothing was ever proved.
As a result of the Top Storey fire legislation was written in to the Licencing Act 1964 giving more power to fire authorities to close down clubs considered to be fire hazards, while some fire authorities enacted part of the 1961 Act that had recently come into force.

The cause of the fire was never discovered and an inquest returned an open verdict on all 19 dead.

Crown Street car park now covers the site of the club.

Crown Street, 1 May 2011. Picture copyright Lost Pubs Of Bolton, 2011.

Crown Street car park is on the right-hand side and stands on the site of the mill that contained the Top Storey Club. To the left is the rear of Bank Street Chapel. The culverted River Croal runs in front of the church.

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.