A disused pub is no more. So what? Fire failed to finish the job, and so with apparently indecent haste, bulldozers razed the Crooked House in Staffordshire to the ground. People turned up to mourn. Why? Who mourns a disfigured building? What exactly are they mourning? These are reasonable questions, unless you happen to be from the area.
The Crooked House always lived large in the imagination of anyone from the West Midlands. It was the pub where things – marbles, coins, even people – rolled uphill. Optical illusions, of course. I’d wager that for most people who are from where I’m from, the first time you heard the words “optical” and “illusion” used together was in relation to the mysteries of the Crooked House.
