It was the oldest pub in Manchester and thought to be the inspiration for television's most famous boozer.
When the Rovers Return was built at Shudehill in 1306 the Black Death was still 40 years away and William Wallace had been hung, drawn and quartered just 12 months earlier. But it's long history counted for little when the council decided to flatten a large part of the city centre in the 1950s and 60s during a modernisation drive that would eventually pave the way for the Arndale.
Originally one of the outbuildings of Withingreave Hall, a medieval mansion house that would later become home to the 17th-century philanthropist William Hulme, it's unclear exactly when The Rovers Return became a pub.
In fact the nearby Seven Stars, thought to have opened in 1356, also laid claim to the title of Manchester's oldest ale house.
But the licensees of The Rovers Return would boast that the men who built the Seven Stars drank in their pub, while it was also said the stonemasons who began work on Manchester Cathedral in 1421 visited the pub 'to refresh themselves with good home-brewed beer'.
It’s exact location is difficult to pinpoint, but it was said to have been next to the hen market and the original Burgess Bedding factory, somewhere close to the current entrance to the Arndale car park on Withy Grove.
Pictures of the pub, which was later renamed Ye Older Rovers Return, show a timber-framed medieval building, with a bowing bay window and three steps leading up to a central front door. In 1910 it was proudly advertised as the 'oldest beer house in the city', but just 13 years later it had surrendered its license, becoming first a workingmen's cafe, and later a bookshop then an antique shop.
By the 1950s it was known as the Rovers Return Trinket Shop and was said to be haunted by the ghost of a young Jacobite soldier who was often seen gazing at a picture of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Flora MacDonald hung on the walls. It was also said there was a tunnel from the pub to the cathedral.
But by the mid-20th Century the building's days were numbered. The area between Market Street and Withy Grove, a warren of mostly Victorian buildings and warehouses along winding streets and alleys, was firmly in the city council's sights.
During the 50s and 60s a number of 'beat clubs', unlicensed coffee houses and at least one pornographic cinema sprung up in the area, which was later dubbed 'Manchester's Soho'. The clubs included Manchester Cavern on Cromford Court, where American blues stars - like Little Walter and Sister Rosetta Tharpe played, alongside The Rolling Stones, The Kinks and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders.
It was succeeded by the Jigsaw Club, where James Brown, Martha and the Vandellas, the Small Faces, Wilson Pickett and The Who all played live in the 60s.
But not everyone welcomed this new slice of Manchester nightlife.
"Dirty, poorly illuminated and being patronised by individuals of exaggerated dress and deportment, commonly known as mods, rockers and beatniks," was how police described the clubs in 1965. And for some time they'd been a feeling among the powers that be at the town hall that something had to be done to modernise this particular part of the city centre.
From the 1950s onwards the council had been using compulsory purchase powers to buy up buildings around Market Street and Shudehill ready for demolition. The Rovers Return was among the first buildings to go and was unceremoniously flattened in 1958.
It would be almost another 20 years before the Arndale would be built, transforming the city centre when it became Europe's largest shopping centre when it opened in 1976 at a cost of £100m.
Today all that remains of the Rovers Return is a few old photographs and paintings and its famous namesake on the cobbles of Coronation Street.
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