Last Orders...

Recent figures show approximately 18 UK pub closures every week. I imagine that this statistic is made up largely of traditional alehouses sitting outside our city centres. The King's Head is one such establishment, its fate unclear as it sits abandoned and decaying on Chancellor Lane in Ardwick. As far as I'm aware the pub has stood in this spot in the shadows of Manchester's Piccadilly-line railway arches for over a century and possibly much longer. More fortunate ex-pubs are being re-born as restaurants, supermarkets, fast-food outlets and offices but many are lost to the town planners, developers and their bulldozers. Whilst it wasn't quite sawdust and spittoons The King's was never at the height of sophisticated entertainment in my years of frequenting it. I enjoyed many good times there, I worked a few hundred yards away for over 25 years and I have plenty of lunchtimes, pool nights, darts nights, leaving-do's, Christmas celebrations, lock-ins, sausage barmcakes and hot-pot supper memories. I'm not sure when it finally closed but I hadn't been in since 2001 when I left that employment. I guess the pub has witnessed many changes in its time, originally Ardwick was a pleasant and affluent suburb until the city spread with industry and cheap housing taking over the area. Factories, warehouses and terraced housing surrounded the pub until the 1970s when most of the houses were demolished and the area started to fall into decline. The office worker clientele probably kept the business afloat for many years but the local trades have mostly disappeared and with little housing and community in the area so the viability for a pub has ceased.