Demise of the local boozer
MONICA Livesey, landlady of The Gold Cup in Longsight, pulls me a pint of Guinness and looks ruefully over to a conspicuously empty corner of the lounge bar. It’s a quiet Tuesday afternoon. There are a few customers but none in that part of the lounge.
“Everybody that sits there for a long time dies, so they call it God’s waiting room,” said Monica, 71, who has been the licensee here since 1995.
Since November, seven regulars who would sit there have died and the remaining patrons make a point of perching themselves elsewhere.
“That used to be packed, that corner,” says Monica.
Behind the bar in the vault, the wall is plastered with yellowing pictures of regulars – Monica points out the ones who are no longer with us.
Back in the day Longsight was full of pubs – more than 30 boozers were strung along the A6 Stockport Road and most of them would be packed with working folk letting their hair down on a Friday or Saturday night.
Now there are just two. The Gold Cup is one of them.
Monica and her regulars reminisce fondly about those who have gone, and how it used to be in this once thriving Longsight boozer.
“I lived around the corner,” she says. “I used to come in here for a drink with my mum and aunt. It was nice.”
Misty-eyed, she looks over to a small stage in another corner of her pub.
“There was an old piano there. Someone would play and people sang. They were great days, them,” she says.
“Every day and every night it was packed. It was really good. It was always packed. It was mostly working men coming in at five o’clock after work. On a Saturday and Sunday it was families. It was great. I used to have four or five staff behind the bar. I’m down to one now. And it was six or seven deep at the bar. It was heaving. We used to have a bit of music on, someone playing the guitar.”
In 1962, Monica came over from Dublin, aged 14, with her mum and dad, who was looking for work.
The Gold Cup, which was and still is an Irish pub, was a much-loved local watering-hole until fairly recently. Before he became a star footballer for United, a young Wes Brown used to come in with his brothers, mostly to play the slots.
So what went wrong? Monica has no doubt what was to blame – the ban on smoking in pubs that was introduced in England on July 1, 2007.
“It killed most of it, plus you have
Asda up the road selling a pack of four for two quid. People thought ‘I might as well drink in my own house and smoke in my own house for two or three quid,’” says Monica.
Monica became known as ‘Ruthless Rita’ – her full name is Rita Monica Livesey – partly because she refused to allow customers to flout the smoking ban. And if you were barred for that or any other reason, you stayed barred. ‘Ruthless Rita’ didn’t do second chances.
“People just stopped coming in”, she recalls. “I had fights with them because they were sitting there having a cigarette in the pub. I was phoning the police until eventually they got the message. I must have barred about 20 people. They stopped coming in. They thought they may as well stop at home. That’s when the pub started going down the drain, not only this one but all these pubs.”
As custom slowed to a trickle, the pub’s football, darts and pool teams all folded.
Sitting at the bar, one of her regulars, Dennis Moores, 66, makes Monica flush a little with embarrassment as he describes her as ‘a pillar of the community – an absolute diamond,’ and not just because he wants a free pint.
“All the pubs round here are turning into restaurants or shops or Arabic learning centres,” he says. “I have lived here all my life. I started coming in here 22 or 23 years ago. A pub is part of the community. It’s where everybody goes. It’s the smoking ban but it’s the cultural change as well. I have said it for years. You can build a pub in the middle of a housing estate but nobody in the housing estate will go to that pub. They will go to the supermarket to buy beer because it’s cheaper.”
Longsight was ‘becoming dry’ because it was a ‘community of Asian people,’ he adds, although Monica baulks at the suggestion. Of course it is true that drinking alcohol is forbidden in Islam, and that Longsight is home to one of south Manchester’s biggest Islamic communities.
The 2011 census recorded 55 per cent of Longsight’s 15,429 residents as Asian or Asian British, some 27pc as white, while and 10pc black (black, African, Caribbean or Black British).
However, demographics don’t really explain the decline – Longsight has been diverse for much of living memory, and the Gold Cup neighbours Longsight and Ardwick’s council estates, where residents are of largely white, black or of mixed ethnicity, rather than Asian Muslim heritage.
“I love it,” Monica’s daughter Miranda tells me as she works behind the bar. “I wouldn’t go from here to another pub. This is the only pub that’s functioning around here.”
Monica, a divorced mother of seven, still lives in private quarters above the pub with two of her 20 grandchildren, but she admits she could soon be calling time on her life as a landlady, and that would probably mean the end for The Gold Cup. “I’m getting a bit tired, but I love it because it keeps me going and gives me something to do in the morning,” she says. “It keeps me on the go until eleven at night. I’ve got no time to sit down and think about things. If I was in a flat on my own I would lay down and die.”
If Monica declines to renew the lease – she’s not decided yet – and no one else takes it on, that would leave The Huntington as the only pub left in Longsight.
Bit by bit, pieces of Longsight’s social history have disappeared over the years. The Bay Horse became a cashand-carry. The New Victoria is a children’s nursery. Others have been demolished. Hopefully, The Gold Cup’s race isn’t run yet.