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This is part of our occasional series highlighting interesting blogs and the theme this time is pubs in the 20th century.

Screenshot: Manchester’s Estate Pubs.Manchester’s Estate Pubs is put together by the pseudonymous ‘modernmoocher’ and features original photographs accompanied by sometimes lyrical prose:
Point a camera at a hard man and he’ll tell you exactly what you want to hear, it’s easy, though it’s much, much harder to fill a pub these days – tough times.
Standing lost and forlorn in a sea of green grass – nobody’s home, laid low by a litre and a half of Lambrini or six.
Bare burnt rafters, boarded doors, the sign no longer swings in the wind.
Somebody just called tinned-up time.
Billy Greens is no more.
manchestersestatepubs.wordpress.com
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The Never Ending Pub Crawl*is put together by Alan Winfield and alternates between accounts of recent expeditions and those from 30 years ago. The latter are accompanied by photographs which, though straightforward in style, have attained a certain romance with age, like this one from 1987:
© Alan Winfieldneverendingpubcrawl.blogspot.co.uk
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Screenshot: Pubs of Manchester.We found both of the relatively new blogs above via Pubs of Manchester (@Pubs_of_Mcr*on Twitter), a website of long-standing that*also belongs in this list. Its author takes the time and trouble to document even the most lowly of pubs using every photograph he can harvest from private collections, old publications and various corners of the internet. A fascinating recent post, which is fairly typical, is this one about The House That Jack Built:
The*House That Jack Built*was a very distinctive 1970s estate pub, opening in 1975 at the newly-built Newbury Place shopping centre off Bury New Road in Higher Broughton… It was described in the Manchester Evening News at the time as ‘something entirely different’ – a maze of bars, passages and alcoves with an indoor tree house!
The tone is often rather wistful — so many of the pubs chronicled have disappeared, many in the last few years — which only underlines the importance of recording their existence before they are forgotten altogether.
pubsofmanchester.blogspot.co.uk
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Any other suggestions for blogs that belong on this list are very welcome — leave a comment below.
Nostalgic 20th Century Pub Blogs from Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Over-thinking beer, pubs and the meaning of craft since 2007


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