Pubs of Manchester

All pubs within the city centre and beyond.
A history of Manchester's hundreds of lost pubs.

Saturday 26 October 2013

Lightbowne, Lightbowne Road

Lightbowne, Lightbowne Road, Moston. (c) Alan Winfield with permission.

The Lightbowne was a huge inter-war estate pub on the corner of Sulby Street and Lightbowne Road in Moston.  It closed a few years ago and was sadly knocked down in 2011 and replaced by the Lightbowne Hall retirement home.  An original Lightbowne Hall (1936) stood on this spot before the pub was built.

Lightbowne, Lightbowne Road. (c) PML Limited.

The Lightbowne was a Whitbread house in the 1990s and offered Boddingtons bitter, which even by then, had started to deteriorate in taste, as the corporate style-over-substance policy kicked in, eventually leading to the death of the ale.  These archive photos from 1968 show the Lightbowne Hotel as a Chesters house, but by 1971 was branded as Whitbread.

Lightbowne, Lightbowne Road. (c) novaloca.

There's a picture of the Lightbowne being knocked down at flickr and Google Maps aerial view shows the pub still there.  The immense size of the boozer and its car park is clue to why these old inter-war pubs are closing at such a rate - they are just too big to support communities that are increasingly disinterested in using pubs.

Lightbowne, Lightbowne Road. (c) Google 2013. View Larger Map.

Former location of the Lightbowne, Lightbowne Road. (c) Google 2013. View Larger Map.

1 comment:

  1. My husband played there many times with the Central Manchester Band on a Sunday afternoon, late 60s and early 70s

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