THE Telegraph and Argus recently featured two old Bradford pubs in news items.

The Red House on Barkerend Road, which it is proposed to demolish, was the subject of articles back on January 4 and 18 2020.

If it does go, so will a pub which dated back to the mid-19th century, taking its name from the very un-Bradford red brick of its construction. Although for a while now it has looked in a very sorry state indeed.

The history of the Fighting Cock, which is for sale, might be of interest. It opened as a beerhouse in April 1868 in Preston Place, part of the eponymous street which connects Lister Hills and Thornton Roads.

In that year there was a rush to open beerhouses, which under legislation of 1830 could trade for beer only without a magistrates’ licence, as the following year the right was finally removed amidst much controversy about how badly some of them were run.

In the event, in Bradford 60 such beerhouses were then closed due to the disorder, prostitution and crime associated with them.

The Preston Hotel, like most of the remaining 400 or so beerhouses, was spared and continued to trade, beginning with landlord James Holdsworth.

It is a classic urban street-corner pub, a type that was to become quite a rarity as the number of pubs was reduced over the decades by road schemes, slum clearance and the disappearance of the industries whose workers had once provided so many of the customers.

The Rovers Return of course is another survivor!

The Preston Hotel made its mark relatively infrequently on the historical record during my research into pubs some years ago now. In the police register of beerhouses, part of the Bradford police records at the West Yorkshire Archive Service in Wakefield, landlady Elizabeth Smith twice had charges of allowing gambling on the premises dismissed in 1908. This was a very popular pub pastime in those days but before small stakes were made legal, one which, along with betting on horse races, often landed the publican in court.

My photograph, taken some time in the 1920s, shows it as belonging to Joseph Stocks and Company, brewers of Shibden Head, between Queensbury and Halifax.

They ran a number of pubs in the city up to the merger with Websters of Halifax in 1933. Then in the 1980s it found a new life as a real ale pub, The Fighting Cock.

I knew it in the early to mid-1990s, when the Bradford and District Beer Guide rightly described it as ‘a very basic back street ale house in a run-down industrial area...but still a beer drinkers haven’, selling over 500 different beers in any 12-month period.

Since moving from the city some 25 years ago, I have had rather less occasion to visit but when I did, it retained those admirable characteristics and one can only hope for its future in these uncertain times.

* Dr Paul Jennings is author of The Local: A History of the English Pub and Bradford Pubs.