Has anyone seen Adam and Carly Taylor, owners of the Crooked House on Himley Road in Staffordshire? The Taylors took ownership of the historic wonky pub just over a fortnight ago, only for it to be gutted by fire nine days later. Within 48 hours of the night-time blaze, which has sparked national outrage, the structural remains of the Crooked House were hastily reduced to rubble by a digger – without council permission. Which has also sparked national outrage. But still no public sign of the Taylors. Normally in a case such as this, you would expect to see the owners weeping on the local TV news about their loss and the cruelty of it. Yet even as the story goes international with a big write-up in the New York Times, Adam and Carly are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they are simply too devastated to come before the TV cameras.
We should note right from the get-go that the couple have not been identified as suspects – indeed, the local police show impressive commitment to modernspeak by announcing that they “continue to engage” with the owners. A way of putting it that suggests the force “reached out” to the pair, “opened a constructive dialogue”, and “hope to land on the same page” in due course. We must wish them all the best with their investigation, at the same time as encouraging any Belgian or deerstalkered detectives to make their way immediately to the Dudley area to assist with inquiries.
In the meantime, given the fire is being treated as arson, could the cops not perhaps persuade the Taylors to front a public appeal for witnesses? I am sure that anyone currently withholding information would only have to take one look into the red-rimmed eyes of either Taylor to realise that any titbit, no matter how small, should be given to the police in the hope that it provides the crucial lead and permits the force to crack this most mysterious of cases.
As it burned last Saturday night, it seemed almost as if the fates were conspiring against the survival of the Crooked House, which – and you should see this merely as an instance of Jungian synchronicity – lies next-door to a quarry and landfill site of which Mr Taylor is a former director. Firefighters who were called out to the blaze by the public say they found it difficult to access the building as large mounds of dirt were blocking the access road.
Then again, the saga has not been without its happy accidents. The Taylors were incredibly fortunate to have a 14-tonne excavator already on site, the vehicle having been hired the week before the fire. The owner of the hire company has himself now come under attack via social media and email, and says that had he known this was going to happen he would “probably have done something different,” adding, “but I’m not Mystic Meg”. Quite so, and which of us is?
No sooner had the Crooked House gone up in flames than furious people were calling for the unique pub to be rebuilt brick by brick – a task that is now considerably more difficult after the building’s complete destruction by the excavator. However, it is not entirely without precedent. A few years ago, the Carlton Tavern in London’s Maida Vale was illegally bulldozed by developers. Following a tireless and impassioned local campaign, it reopened in 2021 after Westminster council had forced the owners to rebuild it “in facsimile”. Meanwhile it’s possible the whole affair is unfolding surprisingly for the Taylors, who own various quarry and development sites, have gutted and shut a pub five miles away, and seem unlikely to have forecast that their personal tragedy would catch quite so much attention.
The word “undermine” is now used figuratively, but started out hundreds of years ago connoting the literal business of rendering something unstable by digging somewhere beneath its foundations. That was what made the Crooked House crooked originally – it was positioned within the bounds of Himley colliery, and under-mining caused the subsidence that eventually resulted in one end of the pub sitting 4ft lower than the other.
But perhaps the reason the Crooked House’s destruction has struck quite such a chord is that it taps into that very prevalent sense that things in this country are being figuratively undermined. You hear a lot these days about dysfunction in the public realm and far beyond, as well as people’s sense of powerlessness about it. Photos from the former pub site show locals stumbling around the pile of charred bricks. The general vibe is of people standing in the rubble of something they cared about, and there not being a whole lot they can do about it. Symbolic/relatable/extremely on the nose – take your pick. One of the dominant moods of the age is that something is being got away with.
Set against that, regrettably, must be the knowledge that however much people loved the Crooked House, it wasn’t quite enough to visit very often. The pub’s former landlord this week spoke of the ultimately doomed task of keeping it going through last winter, when on many days only “a handful” of people would step through its doors. A reminder, perhaps, to check in on our favourite local places as we might on elderly relatives. The Crooked House was certainly elderly, having stood in some form since 1765.
As for the Taylors, could the couple please present themselves before a TV camera at their earliest opportunity? After all, speaking of concern for welfare, I’m sure a nation very much wishes to check in on them.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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