High on a hill, above Stockport town centre sat the Jack and Jill.
Built in 1954 to serve the emerging nearby social housing estate.
A curved brick frontage overlooking the Goyt Valley.
Classical Moderne with a splash of Brut – it’s all over.
In happier times it served the Community.
Tinned-up doors and windows, no sign of a sign.
No sign of signs of life, save the landlord of eight years packing up to leave for pastures new, The Friendship in Romiley.
I asked if the Jack and Jill was to be demolished?
No amount of vinegar and brown paper, I fear, will put Jack back together again.
– sat The Swinging Sporran, closer to the culverted Medlock than thee.
The decontextualised allusion to outlandish Bamforth innuendo and Caledonian capers.
The Swinging Sporran now, no longer swings.
It began as an abrupt end to a multi-storey car park that wanted to go on forever.
A sociable adjunct to the Umist campus and a suitably Modernist companion in both style and demeanour, bunker like brick blocks just about topped by a residential core.
It became home to live music and DJs of every stripe, enough to induce spots before your very, very wavy eyes.
The Swinging Sporran becomes The Retro Bar, having acquired a kiosk and coffee bar along the way, and an over elaboration of signage and detail that incautiously disguises its original spare aesthetic.
You can if you wish, escape through a door, climb the stairway to the stars, and gaze at the campus below, hurry though.
Billy Green was a boxer.
Billy Green was a landlord.
Billy Green kept The Vauxhall in Collyhurst – The Vauxhall was named for the nearby Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, formerly Tinker’s and Elysian Gardens.
Collyhurst was then a rural idyll, lit with swaying lanterns, lilting music and laughter filled the night air, my how little has changed.
Billy Greens was a pub, named after Billy Green.
Reputedly the toughest pub in Britain.
I’m turning a corner in my life, I’m turning a corner.
The Clarendon is a shock and a pleasant surprise, an open elevation of slabbed precast concrete, exterior steel spiral staircase attached.
A central residential block, with single storey lounge and bar extensions, surrounded by sufficient space to circumnavigate, marvel and snap with consummate ease.
Laura the current tenant comes out to chat, she’d worked there for some eighteen years, and when the pub fell empty just before Christmas, she decided to take it on. Determined to maintain continuity for a community pub which she, and hopefully others valued.
We went inside, a clean orderly and cared for interior, warmed by a single Calor Gas heater.
Geologists use the term Collyhurst Sandstone for the soft red sandstone, which occurs in North West England. It is a sedimentary rock, created from desert sands blown into dune formations during the Early Permian period, when the area was within the desert belts to the north of the equator. The rock is not very resistant to weathering and erosion and disintegrates relatively quickly.
Historically Collyhurst provided much of the stone which built Manchester.
The Collyhurst Quarry is now gone, landscaped and badged as Sandhills, something of a misplaced, forlorn inner-city country park.
The area is literally built on shifting sands, walking the streets on a Wednesday in deep Winter, one can’t help but be minded of those wind blown Permian deserts.
Collyhurst was once at the very centre of industrial Manchester.
Large tracts of social housing were built in the area, for a workforce that fuelled and fed that City’s steady beating heart.
That industry and heart are now elsewhere, the Sixties estates and their inhabitants however, prevail – the pubs that prospered during the good times are just about hanging on.
The Queens, brick and concrete palace, boasting an Alan Bosyon mural, and bold, modernist, rectangular volumes on an expansive site.
Stop look and listen, to the wind.