On the other side of Fountain Street from the Shakespeare, about four doors down, was the Swan Inn in the mid 18th century [1]. The site of the old pub has the ignominy of being the back of Primark these days, previously Lewis's department store from the 1870s until its closure in 1991 (the IRA bomb of 1996 meant Marks & Spencer were temporarily housed here while their Market Street store was being rebuilt).
1. Manchester City Centre 1849, Alan Godfrey Maps (2008).
The Swan Inn is mentioned in Neil Pearson's 2007 book, _A History of Jack Kahane and the the Obelisk Press_.
ReplyDeleteJack Kahane was a Paris-based émigré publisher from Manchester (Bury New Road) who published works in Paris in the 1930s by the likes of D.H.Lawrence and Henry miller that were banned in the anglophone world. His son, Maurice Girodias, in the 1950s published works by V.Nabokov and William Burroughs under his own imprint, the Olympia Press, also based in Paris.
Back in Manchester, around the beginning of the last century, Kahane and a group of artistically-minded friends set up the Swan Club that used the Swan Inn as a venue for their frequent get-togethers in the town.
Pity there isn't a photo on here of the Inn.