Around the back of the grand old Salford Cinema - also known as the Rex Cinema, and now reduced to the status of a new age church - is the short and still cobbled St Mary's Street. On this corner of St Stephen Street used to stand the Crown Inn beerhouse, long lost to modern flats. The earliest mention of the Crown Inn was in 1863 under licensee Hugh George and the last tenant was Matthew Brennan in 1892, when the pub was a Groves & Whitnall house. By 1908 the brewster sessions ruled that the Crown was badly lit and that trade was "practically at a standstill". By this time Brennan was a widower in his 70s and the brewery - "with utmost consideration" - worried that if the pub was closed the Crimean war veteran would be sent to the workhouse. In any case, Brennan passed away that year and the pub closed, became a confectioner's shop and was the last building to go before the area, complete with St Stephen's school and church a few yards up the road, was flattened for redevelopment [1].
Salford Cinema, Chapel Street. (c) googlemaps.
1. Salford Pubs - Part One: The Old Town including Chapel Street, Greengate and the Adelphi. Neil Richardson (2003).
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