Whistlers Arms, Back Brewery Street

Former location of Whistlers Arms, Back Brewery Street (Great Ducie Street). (c) googlemaps.

Until 2007 the imposing and world famous Boddingtons Brewery stood here with its Brewery Tap on Great Ducie Street, but now a sorry looking car park is all that this site offers Manchester, the once great ale reduced to a memory.  The Strangeways Brewery was opened in 1788 with the Boddingtons name being adopted when Henry Boddington took full control of the company in 1853.  Around this time, the footprint of the brewery was not as large as in recent times, and between the plant and Great Ducie Street in the mid-1880s was a double row of properties separated by Back Ducie Street and Back Brewery Street.  It was on Back Brewery Street where the Whistlers Arms stood, a little sat back from the road with a rear entrance also on Great Ducie Street [1].  The location of the Whistlers would probably have been where the old Boddies Brewery gatehouse is today, still in use in the car park, just behind the beer casks in the below shot.

Former location of Whistlers Arms (Boddingtons Brewery, Great Ducie Street). (c) deltrems at flickr.

1. Manchester Victoria 1849, Alan Godfrey Maps (2009).