The Woolpack – Salford

Belvedere Road, Pendelton.

 

Once one of five pubs to serve the area, an area of newly built and bustling estates, The Woolpack has finally called and served its time. Despite local residents’ moves to revive this once busy pub, it now stands lost and alone .

Gene Houghton of Sycamore Court, Pendleton, said:

It was and will always remain the best pub in Salford.

When these doors closed last year a community closed with it. People come from near and far, everyone knew each other and it was a pleasure to go to.

The entertainment was second to none, especially on a Sunday afternoon. It was a fantastic place.

Even the well intentioned intervention of Happy Monday’s Bez and co has seemingly failed to halt the forces of free market economics and industrial decline

So in area now awash with the great unwashed and ever expanding student population, whose social needs are quite possibly met elsewhere, it remains decidedly:

Closed.

 

 

The Flemish Weaver – Salford

The transition of Manchester into a town was realised as the rest of Britain experienced an increase in population, due to trade and commerce, in the early thirteenth century. During this time Manchester was also granted an annual market, making it one of the most important towns in Lancashire. This, along with the arrival of Flemish weavers and cloth makers in the 14th century, marked the beginnings of Manchester as a major player in the textile industry.

Following a wild flurry of activity in the ensuing centuries, wool and silk are replaced by cotton, in a whirl of spinning jennies, mules, flying shuttles and water frames – cottage industries are replaced overnight by the satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution. Subsequently international capital decides that its time to do one – so off they flounce in search of cheap labour and post-imperial commodity supply chains and markets.

The Cotton Club closes its doors forever.

The Flemish Weaver pub suffers a similar fate, built in the 70s to serve the Pendleton Estate – the tab end of post-war prosperity supplies enough tab ends and pulled pints to support several boozers.

The slow burn of the free market has however, transformed the passing pub trade into a threatened species of ashen faced publicans and absent friends, disappearing in desperately diminishing circles, as time is finally called.

 

The Flemish Weaver finally closed in 2014.

 

 

 

The White Horse – Eccles

110 Gilda Brook Road, Eccles, Salford M30 0DX

This was a pub, now it isn’t.

This is a pub with history.

Beverly Callard her story:

A make believe Coronation Street Rover’s Liz MacDonald, in a real life bar.

Situated at the head of a seriously urban dual- carriageway, hard by a motorway roundabout, a quintessential Sixties Boozer. Pale brick two-storey heart, with lower level lounge extensions.

Once a Robinson’s house, now like so many of their estate, divested of lustrous gold branding, festooned in the Sainsbury’s Local colours of burgundy and orange.

Their orange is a mix of two Pantones – 60% Pantone 021 and 40% Pantone 804.

They seem less forthcoming about their background shade of red.

Things didn’t work out for Bev – as the Manchester Evening News, so sympathetically reported.

“Bev Callard took over the pub in 2005 and later bought the Gallery in Hale Barns.

But she was diagnosed with clinical depression in 2008 after the pubs went bust leaving the couple with debts of £150,000.”

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/eccles-pub-white-horse-once-6836584

Subsequent tenant Bernadette Harvieu fared little better, she took over the pub after winning £250,000 with a National Lottery scratch card, however –

“I couldn’t afford the prices Robinsons were charging for their beer and brought in beer so they have told us to leave.”