purplecat

Just around the corner from us stood Hardy's Well. When we moved here in 2006 it was a pub. At some point in the 1990s Lemn Sissay, Manchester Poet, former chancellor of the university, OBE, was drinking in there. A conversation with the landlady resulted in a poem that was painted on the wall of the pub. It was the first public art poem in what Sissay now identifies as a movement in contemporary poetry in England.





It is not, perhaps, Sissay's best work but it was a significant local landmark.

The pub was always struggling. In the mid 2010s there was a landlord determined to make a go of it with good ideas about exploiting its garden area, but his circumstances changed. There was a brief attempt to run it as a community volunteer venture which folded after a matter of weeks. A fractious email chain in an attempt to organise something resulted in long-standing stalwarts fighting with "ladies who only want to drink wine" and fizzled out into nothing. The pub was closed in 2016. A property developer bought it and for a while builders stayed there while working on other projects. Planning permission was submitted to develop it into flats with the poem preserved in an atrium or lobby space to which the public would have access but the locals objected on various grounds which probably were based in a desire that it should remain a pub. It caught fire and was boarded up. At some point on Wednesday night it caught fire again and had been condemned as unsafe by the council by Thursday morning.



This was the state of play yesterday afternoon.




This was the state of play when I went to look just now.