Tuesday 23 October 2012

Waggon & Horses, Stockport Road


Waggon & Horses, Stockport Road, Longsight. (c) TBC - please email!

The Waggon & Horses was a famous old landmark pub stood at the meeting of Plymouth Grove, Birch Lane and Stockport Road and was only demolished a couple of decades ago.  Under controversial circumstances, reminiscent of the even more famous Tommy Ducks, the Waggon & Horses with its false timbered frontage was pulled down under the dead of night and has been replaced by an uninspiring block of flats.  The pub, shown here in a Chetham's Library image at Manchester History [1], was in the shadow of the Longsight Free Christian Church (also demolished), and its adjoining shops had far more character.

Former location of Waggon & Horses, Stockport Road. (c) Google 2012. View Larger Map.

The Waggon & Horses can be traced back to 1690 when a pub was first recorded here.  The whitewashed pub shown in this old photo from 1900 was built a century or two later, and this postcard from a few years later shows how owners, Wilsons Brewery, incorporated the next door house on Birch Lane.


Waggon & Horses, Stockport Road. (c) TBC - please email! 

In the 1900 photo you can see the  200-odd-year-old mounting stone on the corner of Birch Lane, and it is shown close up here in 1969 and 1971.  By this time, Wilsons had added the timer facade as seen in 1970 and on the 1983 photo from Mick Regan at Manchester History [1].


Waggon & Horses, Stockport Road. (c) TBC - please email! 

A PLEA - I have lost the details of the person who kindly sent these pictures.  Please email!

1 comment:

  1. The Wagon and Horses was a great pub back in the late 1970s. A regular haunt of a gang of us from Unitarian College round the corner in Daisy Bank Road. Lunchtime drinking would be at the Railway Hotel in the modern estate across the road, but evenings at the W&H. Every Friday evening the Sally Army would call in selling the War Cry and a bloke would sell pots of cockles from a basket. Graffiti on the condom machine in the gents - "My Dad wants his money back".

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