Monthly Archives: September 2025

Crown & Kitchen

Leave a Reply
Crown & Kettle public house, Ancoats, Manchester

Researching the history and architecture of public houses is a minefield.  Documentation is widely scattered, images are variable in quality and often undated, and personal memories are often vague because they’re born of habit.

The Crown & Kettle on the corner of Great Ancoats Street and Oldham Road north of Manchester’s city centre has a coherent story that’s repeatedly told but some of the details are open to debate. 

The name is unusual, but not as strange as the earlier name, the “Iron Dish & Cob of Coal”.  Neither has been satisfactorily explained.

The earliest reference to a building on the site is dated 1734 and indicates it was used as a courthouse, and the connection with justice leads to unlikely tales of a secret tunnel to Strangeways Prison (built 1866-68) and “hanging pits” beneath the gents’ lavatory.

The eighteenth-century building isn’t the present-day two-storey pub.  Neil Richardson’s The Old Pubs of Ancoats (2016) cites a directory of 1800 and includes an 1820 sketch of a three-storey, eighteenth-century building with a distinctive sign of a crown and a kettle.

The Manchester Evening News (August 26th 1976) mentions that the Crown & Kettle held a drinks licence by 1799.  There are repeated newspaper advertisements for auctions on the premises from 1800 onwards.

Whatever its origins the current grand building with a high-ceilinged ground floor makes an excellent hostelry and has been a landmark for something like the better part of two centuries.  Its interior is memorable for its elaborate Gothic plaster ceiling and the huge pendants which originally carried gasolier lighting fixtures.

Until the 1990s the snug had mahogany panelling which allegedly came from the R101 airship.  This seems unlikely because the R101 was destroyed when it crashed and burst into flames near Beauvais, northern France, in October 1930 killing 48 passengers and crew.  It’s possible that the panelling actually came from the R100, which was grounded and scrapped after the R101 tragedy.

In the mid-twentieth century the Crown & Kettle was a popular watering hole for journalists and printers from the Daily Express building next door.  One history-forum contributor blamed the pub for the paper’s “speeling mistakes”.  There’s a story that the Express photographer Jack Kay used to visit with his pet duck, which was teetotal and drank water from an ashtray.

The Crown & Kettle was listed Grade II in 1974.  It was closed after an altercation on February 3rd 1990 between supporters of Manchester United and Manchester City that was variously described as a “fight”, a “riot” and “like the Wild West”, and according to the Manchester Evening News caused £30,000-worth of damage.  Every member of staff on duty was injured. 

A subsequent arson attack ruined the mahogany panelling in the snug.

It remained closed until 2005 when, with assistance from English Heritage, the ceiling was partly restored, leaving the remainder “as found”.  After a change of ownership and a further refurbishment in 2000-2001 some of the interior walls were stripped back to the brickwork.

These vicissitudes have enhanced the atmosphere and appeal of the place.  It was awarded the Greater Manchester CAMRA regional Pub of the Year 2015 and the Central Manchester Pub of the Year 2019. 

The Crown & Kettle is a star in Manchester’s city-centre constellation of fine pubs.  Its history is lengthy and robust, and loses nothing in the telling.

Semi-detached, suburban…

Leave a Reply
Clifton Hall, Nottingham: Pages’ Room (1987)

The village of Clifton, on the south bank of the River Trent, opposite Nottingham, was a manorial estate dating back to the eleventh century.  The family who owned it took their name from their property, and for centuries the first-born males were mostly called Gervase which can be confusing.  Some dominant figures have soubriquets, such as the apparently lovable Sir Gervase the Gentle (d1588), and his grandson Sir Gervase the Great, 1st Baronet, who hosted a visit to Clifton by King Charles I.

The family were noted for picking the wrong side in conflicts:  Sir Gervase Clifton (d1471) was beheaded after the turmoil of the Battle of Tewkesbury during the chaotic reign of King Henry VI.  Sir Gervase the Great was a Royalist, and paid fines at the end of the Civil War, yet resumed his status and influence after the Restoration.

In contrast, the ninth and last baronet, Sir Robert Clifton (1826-1869), stood as an Independent MP for Nottingham and won a succession of elections until his death.  Thirty thousand people are estimated to have turned out to witness his funeral procession, and the historian A C Wood drily remarks, “With no sense of incongruity the local papers recorded that the long procession of family mourners, tenantry and friends…was headed by two mutes immediately followed by the presidents of the Beerhouse Keepers’ Association and the Licensed Victuallers’ Association.

The inevitable march of change in the twentieth century, including the approach of council housing towards Clifton Village, led Lieutenant Colonel Peter Thomas Clifton to sell up the estate and the Hall after the Second World War.

Clifton Hall, a magnificent Grade-I listed house incorporating medieval fabric skilfully tidied in c1778-90 by John Carr of York, became a girls’ grammar school in 1958, transferred to the then Trent Polytechnic in 2002, and was sold to the property developer Chek White, who planted fourteen modern houses in a gated community “basking in views of the spectacular, historic hall”.  [Discover your dream home at Clifton Hall Drive … | Smith and Co Estates]

Clifton Hall itself was converted into two semi-detached residences which gained international fame when the property developer Anwar Rashid encountered disconcerting paranormal activity in 2007 as soon as his family moved in.  They stuck it out for eight months and moved to nearby Wollaton.

The South Wing has spectacular rooms which probably result from John Carr’s ingenious conversion of a complex existing structure. 

At the narrow east end of the house he provided a stone façade and a handsome bow running through all three storeys. 

Behind the central loggia of the entrance front, three bays are occupied by the Octagon Hall built on the site of a medieval watchtower.  It’s spectacular, but it restricted staff access between the two wings.

One of the earliest surviving features within the house is the magnificent chimneypiece in the Drawing Room (formerly the Great Chamber), ascribed to John Smythson, dated c1630 and perhaps associated with Charles I’s visit in 1631. 

Of around the same date is the exquisite little Pages’ Room, its black and white painted panelling decorated with extremely rare early seventeenth-century paintings of soldiers’ drill.

Both these features suggest that Clifton at the time of the Civil War had something of the atmosphere that can still be sensed in the Little Keep of Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire.

Clifton Hall has been completely inaccessible to the public for many years now, but the whole building is currently for sale as two lots, each apartment priced at £2.5 million, and the agents’ website is copiously illustrated.

The 9-bedroom, 6-bathroom South Wing is described and illustrated at 9 bedroom semi-detached house for sale in South Wing, Clifton Hall, NG11.  The video tour is located between slides 3 and 4.

The 6-bedroom, 5-bathroom North Wing, adapted from the nineteenth-century service quarters, is at 6 bedroom country house for sale in Holgate, Clifton Village, NG11.

Roupell Street

Leave a Reply
Roupell Street, London SE1

When I booked a weekend in London at the Premier Inn London Southwark (Southwark Station), my London-based friend Eric prompted me to seek out the Roupell Street estate as an unexpected historic experience.

It takes only a couple of minutes to walk into a nineteenth-century time-warp of neat little terraces that are now marketed as two-bedroom houses at close on two million pounds each.

The area was developed in the early nineteenth century by the son of a jeweller, John Palmer Roupell (1771-1835), an ambitious, indeed rapacious gold-refiner and metal merchant, who bought seven acres of land in Lambeth Marsh in 1792.  The area was previously tenter grounds, used for drying new-made cloth, until John Palmer Roupell introduced iron and lead works and later, from 1824, laid out streets which were initially named after him and his wife and only son.

This was not a happy family.  The son, Richard Palmer Roupell (1782-1856), feared his father, who he knew would disapprove of his liaison with a carpenter’s daughter, Sarah Crane, with whom he had four clandestine children.  He did not marry Sarah until both his parents were dead, and subsequently had a sole legitimate son, Richard (1840-1883).

The second of the four illegitimate children, William Roupell (1831-1909), assisted his father in developing fifty-five acres of land around Streatham Hill into the Roupell Park estate.  He too was ambitious, and became MP for Lambeth in 1857 after spending £6,000 on campaigning.  This was expedited by destroying his father’s will that left his estate to sixteen-year-old Richard, and forging a substitute that made his mother sole heir and himself sole executor. 

This fraud unravelled in 1862, and though he destroyed documents and fled to Spain, he chose to return and face charges.  He repented in a confessional pamphlet, and after serving a fourteen-year sentence he went to live with his mother and sister on Brixton Hill, made himself respectable but not frugal, outlived the rest of the family and died in poverty.  Three hundred people attended when he was buried in the family vault in West Norwood Cemetery, the last of the Roupells.

Roupell Street is the sole memento of these doings, an urbane enclave that takes no notice of Waterloo East Station and the South Bank.  The elegant little cottages are built in a warm brown brick, many of them with gables that are oddly out of step with the rhythm of the front doors. 

In the middle of the grid of streets is a dignified pub, the King’s Arms, which looks as if it hasn’t changed for a century, but boasts a fine Thai kitchen.  The Londonist website [King’s Arms | Londonist] advises, “[it] might lazily be declared a ‘hidden gem’. Judging by the crowds who find the place every evening, there’s nothing very ‘hidden’ about it. Turn up of an afternoon, however, and you’ll find the perfect corner pub for a quiet pint.”  Its interior is described and evaluated at King’s Arms, London – CAMRA – The Campaign for Real Ale.

If I didn’t know Eric, who knows London, I would never have found it.