Wander into the Coach and Horses pub on a Tuesday afternoon and you’ll find half a dozen punters putting the world to rights in one of the side rooms or perched along the bar, chatting with landlady Sue Hawley as she prepares for a busy evening trade.
Inside the pub on Bury Old Road you’ll also spot a newspaper clipping hanging from the wall. Dating back several decades, the paper has frayed and turned a reddish-brown, but squint and you can still make out the words.
A window into the pub’s storied past, it was published some time after Arthur Burnham took over the pub in 1980 - “a real gent”, Sue tells me. Under the headline ‘Real ale buffs pick the Coach’, it reads: “If you like your pubs with that 'lived-in' look then the Coach and Horses is just the job”.
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Dating back to 1830, the building was once a staging post for the Burnley to Manchester mail coach and the current beer garden at the back was used as a turn-around for coaches. Its first landlord was Robert Bentley, the only brewer in Prestwich at the time, before it changed hands to Carringtons in 1879, and later Joseph Holt after the turn of the Century.
The clipping goes on to paint a picture of a pub famed for its sepia-coloured wallpaper, cosy rooms, and capacity to provide solitude “for the drinker who prefers to share his pint with people not pop music”. Fast forward to today and the Whitefield pub has changed a lot, though it has retained its strong community spirit.
It was recently voted Greater Manchester’s best pub by Manchester Evening News’ readers in our Love Your Local awards - a campaign launched to support the region’s boozers in these increasingly difficult times. It was up against stiff competition, but ran away with a win, so a trip to the historic watering hole was in order.
Sue, who has worked for brewers Joseph Holt for over 25 years, was offered the role of tenant in 2019, after years of providing pub relief. “It was known as an old man’s pub before I took over,” she tells me as we sit down for a chat in The Snug - once the Bar Parlour. “I did relief cover here for a few months and trade really started to pick up, but then the pandemic put a stop to things - I was totally devastated.”
It’s not been an easy ride for the landlady from Bury who always wanted to run her own pub. A global pandemic shuttered the Whitefield drinking spot not long after she took over, but rather than dwell on it, she, and her husband, set about transforming the pub into a space where all the community felt welcome.
“I’d brought five lads up and I’d always wanted my own pub but it wasn’t the right time, so once they had grown up I decided I could do it - plus, my husband said ‘if you don’t do it now you never will’. Being closed during Covid was very difficult, but it gave us a chance to redecorate. We did it all ourselves, so when customers did come back, we had totally transformed the outside space.”
The pub’s nomination in the awards was really a tribute to Sue, who pub-goers told us goes “above and beyond” for her local community. One person wrote in to say: “The landlady Sue Hawley looks after all ages by doing different events to suit all ages. I particularly love the way she does things for the older, lonely groups. She cooks Christmas dinner for her 11am regulars and takes them to their houses - that's real care in the community.”
Despite having only been at the helm for three years, Sue has already raised money to get a defibrillator fitted outside, welcomed numerous local clubs - from ladies darts to the allotment society - and started a cabaret lunch for seniors in the community. And that’s before we even get started on her impeccable Sunday roasts.
If you’re wondering what the secret to her success is, well it’s Sue’s no-nonsense approach. “I run my pub the way I like my pub to be run,” she informs me. “I have done a lot of reliefs where I think ‘what is going on here’, so I wanted somewhere where I could put my mark on. You know, I’m 57 this year, I don’t want to be at a pub where I’m throwing people out - I’ve done all that.”
It’s also the rapport she’s built with her regulars and a host of new faces. Off to the side of the entrance hall, in one of the pub’s main rooms, a group of men congregate, they frequent several pubs in the area, but they affectionately refer to the Coach and Horses as their HQ.
One tells me that the success of the pub in recent years is down to Sue realising its potential, while another, who has been coming to the pub for over thirty years, says there’s a greater diversity of people coming through the door nowadays and that it’s a “community” pub with a “welcoming” atmosphere.
When she took over, and during Covid, Sue and her team set about sprucing up the place. They took out the dark wood along the bar, got rid of pictures, which she said in some instances were bizarre - “one was just of a cigar, what’s that all about”, she says, shoulders shrugged - and gave it a fresh lick of paint. But it’s the outside area that she’s most proud of.
Stepping outside into the beer garden is like stepping into Sue’s very own dreamland. A stage built by her husband and one of her sons hosts regular music nights, while a summer house sits at the back, and is used for a wide range of functions. But before you get to that, there’s the group of animal statues - from giraffes and elephants to monkeys and ducks - as well as an old school-style red phone box she made herself.
“That’s my quirkiness that’s coming out with the outside area,” she smiles. “My husband asked why I wanted giraffes and made an old-styled phone box, and I said ‘because that’s what I want’.”
As they navigated lockdown rules and regulations, including the ‘substantial’ meal policy introduced to hospitality venues, Sue and the team fitted a small kitchen behind the bar. And even though it didn’t come in much use during the pandemic, it’s now where she cooks up her popular Sunday roasts. “I honestly can’t make them fast enough, they sell out every week," she smiles.
For £9.95, pub-goers can enjoy either lamb, beef or chicken with all the trimmings and a slice of Sue’s homemade cheese pie. “People can sit in or takeaway, though when people do take plates home, the next day I’m on Facebook asking for them back. Some people say it’s too cheap for my roasts and the food I serve for seniors at the cabaret lunch, but I don’t want to take advantage of people.”
Sue knows better than most about how important places like the Coach and Horses can be for the local spirit - especially for the older generation. “They are the heart of the community, and what annoyed me during Covid was people saying we should keep the pubs closed, everyone just goes there to get drunk.
“But actually, I have a regular who comes in every morning, he lives on his own, has two pints and goes home, but that might be the only interaction he has all day - people don’t think about that. A lot of them are now alone and have nowhere to go, that's why pubs are so important. If you make a safe haven for people they will come and I believe we have created something like that - I call it a safe place.”
The pandemic also meant regular check-ins from the police, ensuring pubs were sticking to strict curfews. “It was mad. We had so many visits that one I asked them whether they didn’t have anything better to do on a Friday night. I wouldn’t have minded but there were about five or six of them filing out of the van.”
In recent months, her attention has turned to rising energy costs and food bills, as she, like many other publicans, grapples with whether to keep the heating off or charge more for food. “I worry if people will be able to afford to come out and spend money at the pub, will people be cut back,” she says.
“I have noticed that people who used to come in every day are not coming in as often, it really adds up over a year if you think about it. I class this as a seasonal pub. I do really well in summer but winter is hard and we don’t know what’s going to happen with the bills in April, so it’s a worrying time.”
But every worry or concern of Sue’s is offset by a funny anecdote or story about her cherished customers. “My customers are great people and they’ve been so kind about what I’ve done for their pub.”
As we go to leave, she quickly runs through the prices of bitter, which ranges from £3.35 to £4 for a pint, and tells us about a recent taste test she carried out with some of her regulars after Joseph Holt decided to replace Guinness for its own Trailblazer Stout.
“We gave them one pint of each and didn’t tell them which was which, but I confused the hell out of one fella because I gave him two Trailblazers. Well he had no idea, he picked up one and said he would be able to tell. He shook his head at the first one and with the second, he took a sip and said ‘that’s the baby’. I couldn’t tell him for days, he thought he had it sussed.”
She beams as she tells this story, and it’s clear why the Coach and Horses was nominated - and eventually went on to win the coveted title of Greater Manchester's best pub. Community is at the heart of this historic pub, with memories of punters past and present woven into its walls - a very special place indeed.
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