This is part of our occasional series highlighting interesting blogs and the theme this time is pubs in the 20th century.
Manchester’s Estate Pubs is put together by the pseudonymous ‘modernmoocher’ and features original photographs accompanied by sometimes lyrical prose:
Point a camera at a hard man and he’ll tell you exactly what you want to hear, it’s easy, though it’s much, much harder to fill a pub these days – tough times.
Standing lost and forlorn in a sea of green grass – nobody’s home, laid low by a litre and a half of Lambrini or six.
Bare burnt rafters, boarded doors, the sign no longer swings in the wind.
Somebody just called tinned-up time.
Billy Greens is no more.
manchestersestatepubs.wordpress.com
*
The Never Ending Pub Crawl is put together by Alan Winfield and alternates between accounts of recent expeditions and those from 30 years ago. The latter are accompanied by photographs which, though straightforward in style, have attained a certain romance with age, like this one from 1987:
neverendingpubcrawl.blogspot.co.uk
*
We found both of the relatively new blogs above via Pubs of Manchester (@Pubs_of_Mcr on Twitter), a website of long-standing that also belongs in this list. Its author takes the time and trouble to document even the most lowly of pubs using every photograph he can harvest from private collections, old publications and various corners of the internet. A fascinating recent post, which is fairly typical, is this one about The House That Jack Built:
The House That Jack Built was a very distinctive 1970s estate pub, opening in 1975 at the newly-built Newbury Place shopping centre off Bury New Road in Higher Broughton… It was described in the Manchester Evening News at the time as ‘something entirely different’ – a maze of bars, passages and alcoves with an indoor tree house!
The tone is often rather wistful — so many of the pubs chronicled have disappeared, often only in recent years — which only underlines the importance of recording their existence before they are forgotten altogether.
pubsofmanchester.blogspot.co.uk
*
Any other suggestions for blogs that belong on this list are very welcome — leave a comment below.
8 replies on “Nostalgic 20th Century Pub Blogs”
These are great, especially the Never Ending Pub Crawl! Banged ’em straight into my Feedly, thanks for sharing.
I wonder if the Manchester Estate Pubs one is a follow-on from this one, which is now dormant. Same subject matter, but very different style.
No, it’s by my friend Stephen Marland, and whist I know he’s aware of and a fan of the Estate pubs of Manchester blog it is totally separate.
The original estate pubs blog was a sideline of Pubs of Manchester. Sadly we have less time than ever to add much to either but aim to keep them ticking over slowly, and there are long lists of pubs to add to both.
Pleasingly, the newer estate pubs site from Stephen uses the original as inspiration to visit and document these unheralded pubs in fine fashion.
The Never Ending Pub Crawl is all Alan’s with an occasional helping hand.
I started my Estate Pubs blog in response to the Historic England campaign to list the extant examples and my love of pubs, Manchester and Modernism and found Dan Granata’s site an invaluable resource, will carry on snapping to record as many as possible, sharpish like – arrived at The Sparrow in Collyhurst the other day only to find it gone
Made a comment but can’t see it so I’ll try again, apologies if I end up repeating myself (and Dan). The Modernmoocher is Steve Marland, who can be found on Flickr. He’s inspired by but separate from the wonderful Estate pubs of Manchester blog.
I couldn’t let this pass without mentioning the work of my late brother Paul who put together the flickr site Salford Pubs of the 70’s.
As he said in the introduction
“The concept here is to record every pub that served a pint in Salford at any point during the 1970s from the Queens Hotel on Ordsall Lane which closed in January 1970 through to the modern Ship on Cross Lane which didn’t open until December 1979.”
Enjoy
The quote about the Valley at the top of the page are mine,that what i thought of the pub at the time i did it,i also have a decent colour photo of the Swinging Sporran which is also on the same site.
I have so many estate pub pictures to add to my new blog,but i also want to add my newer pub crawls.
Thanks for taking a look at my new blog.