Look back: Cock and Bottle pub in Bradford

The first documented reference to a building on the site was in 1747, plus an adjoining cottage and a close of land called the Toad-hole.

These and other details are taken from the deeds to the pub, which I looked at in the mid-1980s, and which Chris Scargill used to write a history of the pub when Tetley’s brewery designated it one of their Heritage Inns in 1984.

The old pub entrance

It was occupied by one John Clough and since a James Clough is recorded in early licensing records, it is likely that it had been a public house since at least the mid-18th century.

Its location was important, at the point where a branch from the old road to Leeds went along North Wing towards Otley and Harrogate. Leeds and Otley roads as we know them were later creations.

The name Cock and Bottle appears in early 19th century directories and licensing records, when John Thornton was the landlord.

After his death and that of his widow, Ellen, it passed to their son James then in 1859 to a nephew, James Bower. By this time the area around the inn was being developed with housing along North Wing towards Wapping and up Otley Road, as Bradford continued its great expansion with industrialisation.

The pub was one of the few older buildings to survive the post-war transformation of the area

At this time, Bower rebuilt the frontage and remodelled the interior, the former adjoining cottage having been incorporated into the building. Bower was an important figure in the local pub world, being President of the Licensed Victuallers Society. In 1875 he presided over its annual dinner at the Oddfellows Hotel on Thornton Road, described in the Bradford Observer as a most ‘recherché gathering’. Back at the Cock and Bottle, things were a little less sophisticated as at that time two cart drivers and two labourers assaulted a waiter there. This was a poor working-class neighbourhood, with by the end of the century a mix of English and Irish residents and a little colony of Italians at the bottom of Otley Road.

Bower sold the pub in 1888 to George Albert Booth, a Keighley man, who at the 1891 census employed a barmaid and three waitresses, plus a nurse for their three-year-old son. In his time, the Cock and Bottle was, as the sale particulars put it in 1901, when Booth retired, ‘elaborately fitted up on the most modern principles’ to give the splendid layout and décor that survived into modern times, with its multiple rooms, an upstairs function room used for many years by the RAOB, a bottle and jug department and the beautiful ‘gin-palace’ style fixtures and fittings.

The pub was leased and then bought by Willie Howard, who continued to brew his beer on the premises, which was by then quite rare. Like Booth, he was active in local political life in the Licensed Victuallers Society and standing in the Conservative interest for the Council, but unlike Booth, who represented the North Ward for several years, he was unsuccessful. Publicans generally supported the Conservative party, at a time when the opposing Liberals were more identified with the temperance movement. He also had other business interests ‘of some magnitude’, according to local trade paper The Licensee.

Howard died in 1927 and his executors sold the pub to the Leeds and Wakefield Brewery, the Melbourne, whose trademark courtier adorned the outer wall and was incorporated, along with stained glass, into the earlier decoration. In time, it became a Tetley’s house. This was the pub as I encountered it from the early 1980s. It was then one of the few older buildings to have survived the post-war transformation of the area. It seemed to do a good trade, attracting a loyal local following and visitors drawn to its liveliness and lovely interior, which was used as a set in the 1983 film The Dresser. Another great attraction was Gabriel on the piano.

The Cock and Bottle in 1986

But at some point the pub began to decline. The construction of the six-lane inner ring road immediately below it cannot have helped. By the late 80s and early 90s the pub world was contracting quite sharply but sometimes there are reasons more specific to a pub and its management. By 1995, the Bradford and District Beer Guide, whilst extolling the stained glass, mirrors, woodwork and etched windows, was noting that it was ‘Sadly in need of some serious restoration.’ In one of my last visits, the pub had run out of beer and seemed chaotic, with boxes and crates piled everywhere.

Manageress Roni Breakwell pulling a pint behind the Cock and Bottle bar in 1988

But in 1999 it opened as what was claimed to be Britain’s first Christian pub. This did not last. It was again boarded up, until bought in 2005 by a local brewer, who restored it. This also didn’t last and the pub was once again closed. In 2013, in a hugely controversial chain of events, Bradford Council approved major alterations to the interior. This was documented with some vehemence in the revised edition of Yorkshire’s Real Heritage Pubs, which detailed pub interiors of Special Historic Interest, of which in the Yorkshire region there were a mere 119, just two per cent of the total. Unsurprisingly, as in their view it was ‘one of the UK’s very finest late-Victorian pub interiors’.

But the pub closed and was converted to a restaurant and later the Café Patisserie, which closed. The other week I stopped in Otley Road and had a look. The blue Heritage Inn plaque was still on the wall, designated ‘by virtue of its historic interest’. Signs indicated it had latterly been a burger place, but it looked empty and peering in through the window I saw no traces of that splendid interior. Another in a long list of treasures Bradford has lost.