Rise and fall of the maligned boozer...

‘NEVER drink in a flat roof pub,’ goes the saying.

Thought to have been coined by the comedian Sean Lock and popularised by Viz magazine, the gag neatly sums up the image problem post-war boozers have wrestled with for years.

Once a vital part of their communities, the estate pub’s decline is often a sign of changing neighbourhoods, shifting work patterns, gentrification, cheap supermarket booze and new leisure pursuits.

Photographer Stephen Marland is a fan though.

He’s been documenting the decline of Manchester’s post-war drinking holes – be they flat or pitched-roof – since 2015 on his blog Manchester’s Estate Pubs.

Stephen, who grew up in Ashton-under-Lyne, says the fascination lies in the architecture, but also in the estate pub’s unique place in Manchester’s social history.

He said: “There is hardly anyone standing up for these kind of pubs and this kind of architecture.

“There’s been a shift in demographics, people’s habits have changed, and it’s these types of pubs that are closing. “They are being converted into things like restaurants and children’s nurseries, or they’re being demolished.” The rise of the estate pub in Manchester goes hand in hand with the expansion of the city in the second half of the 20th century. Slum clearances of inner-city neighbourhoods saw thousands of families moved to newly-built overspill estates on Manchester’s outskirts. And those places – areas such as Collyhurst, Wythenshawe, Langley and Hulme – needed pubs. Maps from the 1950s show just how central to the new estates pubs were. City planners reserved locations for pubs in their drawings, calculating how many were needed to serve the incoming population. In Wythenshawe planners envisioned 12 new boozers on the estate, to open up alongside the four existing pubs in the area. And in optimistic, forward-thinking post-war Britain, the pub was new and modern. Out went the dark wood, brass and ornate features of the typical Victorian pub, and in came brick and concrete, functional fixtures and fittings and a design similar to the interiors of the Simon Delaney, landlord of the Firbank in Newall Green