Sunday 25 March 2012

The lost pub of Beech Road

Peter has painted the Beech before and I have written about it. http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/beech-painting-another-story-and-bit-of.html


But today I want to concentrate on the other buildings in his picture. What are now numbers 70 and 68 are I think the oldest commercial properties still in use in Chorlton and they have intrigued me ever since I began writing my book on the history of the township.*

You might even say it was what got me going. You see Samuel and Sarah Nixon ran the Travellers Rest which was the beer shop next to the Beech for 40 years. They are buried in the parish church yard and it was the chance discovery of their gravestone that started me on researching the history of the village.

Samuel’s father had run the pub across the meadows by Jackson’s Bridge from the 1830s and sometime in the 1840s Samuel and Sarah took over the Travellers Rest. It was the only drinking place on what was then known as the Row and had been made possible by the Beer Act of 1830 which allowed people to set up beer shops for the price of a beer licence.

Stand inside number 70 today and you can get a sense of how small the beer shop would have been, and remember it was only the first half of the present shop which served as the room dispensing beer. Next to it was the stationer’s of Thomas Taylor. Now Taylor was an interesting chap who may have deprived the Methodists of the their Sunday school and owned both numbers 70 and 68 which may date from the 1830s, because he was happy to allow Thomas White later of the Horse and Jockey to apply for the first beer license for number 70 in 1832. But as they say that is all in the book, so no more about them at present.

The two buildings have had a mixed history since and for a long time served as one of our bakery shops here on Beech Road only closing as the Oven Door in the early 1980s. They were then converted back into single units and were much knocked about so today little is left of the original buildings. Even the roof was heightened much to the annoyance of friends who live along Stockton Road and the old stone urinal of the beer shop removed.

Peter’s work is on display around Chorlton and can also be seen at https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures


An occasional series of stories and pictures in the run up to the Glad to be in Chorlton Past and Present Exhibition during the Big Green Festival on March 31s

Picture; Peter Topping 2011 www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

*Chorlton cum Hardy A Society Transformed http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20for%20Chorlton
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/chorlton-cum-hardy-community.html

1 comment:

  1. My great Grandmother was a manageress of the Beech in Beech Road Chorlton Cum Hardy with her family but no mention of the husband in the census info. She was Mary Curbishley. She was a native of Little Leigh in Cheshire and why she was there I have no idea. However the "pub" next door to the Beech inn was owned or managed by Walter Hayes. A surname name in my family. In your researches do you have any more info about these people? Many thanks.

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