Gone But Not Forgotten

I am grateful to the lads at Pubs of Manchester for providing a link to a number of long gone pubs in the Oldham area on Twitter and one or maybe two that are still going.  The Never Ending Pub Crawl is written contemporaneously, but in this case refers to a crawl of Oldham which took place in February 1987.  The aim was to try some Oldham Brewery pubs before they were "Boddingtonised", Oldham Brewery having been taken over by Boddies in 1982 and closed five years later in 1987.

Now this strikes a chord with me, as I too remember doing a similar thing with E reluctantly driving, but regrettably, I didn't photograph them and frankly, with one or two exceptions, I can't remember which they were, or when exactly I went to them but it must have been around that time, though maybe a bit after, as I worked in nearby Failsworth when I moved from Liverpool and there were certainly plenty of OB houses in the old livery dotted around then.

Now as I knew no-one in the area at that time, I used to go out with a few of the people I worked with for a pint and one place I can distinctly remember is featured in the pub crawl above. It was the Rose of Lancaster, a fine old red brick, multi roomed boozer which I fondly remember as being warm and comfortable, but of course, given the passage of time, may have been a draughty old dump. No matter, that's not the point I want to make.  What I do remember is that when we went there, there was always plenty of young Asian lads openly and happily drinking beer there. Such a thing, I imagine, is pretty well unthinkable now.

Times change and the Rose has long since been knocked down, but my memories of what was a large and somewhat multi cultured drinking establishment remain fond ones.

As you can see from the photo, nicked with acknowledgement from the website above, the pub wasn't quite red brick, but those are my memories and it was always dark when I went there.

The photos are great in the Never Ending Pub Crawl, but why in the old days did we always take photos from so far away? The ones I took then are exactly the same.