Page 7 - MANCHESTER PUBS

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Introduction

Now pubs pretty much offer up all that you could want.
Of course most importantly they are a place to meet friends

and family, have a drink and depending on the menu fill a few
hours with some good food.

And of course they have always been one of the centres for
a community, along with the church and later the post office.

But once they were also where the village or township might
come together for an inquest or public meeting.

So when Mary Moore was “most brutally murdered” on her
way back from the Manchester markets in 1838, the inquest
into her death was held in the Red Lion in Withington, while the
Horse and Jockey on Chorlton Green served the same purpose
on several occasions, searching for answers into sudden
deaths.

And in 1881 a representative of the Home Office travelled
all the way up from London to the Lloyds Hotel in Chorlton-
cum-Hardy to convene a public enquiry into the “Great
Chorlton Burial Scandal”.

The oldest Manchester pubs will go back a long time but
many others date from the Beer Act of 1830, when in a move
to combat gin drinking the Government made it easier for
anyone to brew and sell their own beer.

The only requirement was that they would pay two guineas
for a yearly license and after that they could make the stuff
from their own home. The result across the country was an
explosion in the number of beer shops.

In Manchester just ten years after the Beer Act there were
812 beer shops compared to 502 pubs which had risen to 920
in 1843 and a decade later stood at 1572.

In some of our streets in the mid-19th century there could
be three or four such places often standing next to each other.
Most were a short term response to a financial difficulty and
lasted as long as the “crisis” but a few stayed the course and in
time became established as pubs.

And that brings us to the 78 iconic Manchester pubs, some
of which were well established before Wellington won his
victory at Waterloo while others were still in the planning stage
when the City hosted the Commonwealth Games at the turn of
the century.

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