The Lloyd's Hotel, pub, fire exchange, public hall and now an exhibition

It’s the end of a little bit of the Chorlton I have come to like.  

The team that have run the Lloyd’s Hotel for the last few years are moving on and tonight will be their last.

After which the place will close until it reopens in about six week’s time.

So in recognition of the good nights I have had there and as a thank you to the team here is one of the Lloyd stories reprinted from 2012.


It was also one of the venues for that collection of Peter’s paintings and my stories which are the Chorlton History Trail.

It’s not our oldest pub in Chorlton but it has been up since 1870 and played its part in the history of the township.*

It arose out of a partnership between George Lloyd who owned the land and James Platt who built it and the partnership is recorded on a stone inset into the wall.

But once Platt died the place was renamed the Lloyd.

During the 1880s it was bought by a William Roberts and it was the landlady a Mrs Crabtree who by all accounts “improved the place considerably in various particulars” and it may have been her who encouraged the bowling green members to build their own club house which was open on Wednesdays during the season.

She was an enterprising woman with an eye for business and also laid out a lawn tennis court on the open land along side Whitelow Road which later became a car park and is now the site for the modern housing development.

For many years there was a small wooden hut just outside the hotel which was the cabman’s shelter when we still had horse drawn cabs.  Alongside it according to one story was the fire cart with a hand pump and ladder to be used in the event of a local fire.  I can’t say I would have felt reassured by this and so would have welcomed the fire phone.

This was installed in the Lloyd's In 1887 and in the event of a fire residents in the area of New Chorlton could use it and would be connected via the Withington Board Office to the Manchester Exchange who would pass it on to the fire brigade at Jackson's Row.

On the other hand, given that the emergency had to be relayed from Chorlton to Withington and on to Manchester, perhaps the hand cart wasn’t such a bad idea. Moreover the telephone link was fraught with difficulties as the manager of the Lancashire and Cheshire Telephonic Exchange pointed out in the February of that year, because it only needed “the switch at the Local Board’s offices to be left out of its proper position” and the signal from the Lloyd’s Hotel would not get through to the operator in Manchester. His solution was for the Withington Board to pay the annual fee of £30-40 to secure a line.

In its time the Lloyd’s was also at the centre of so much of the life at this end of Chorlton. For a short while the Conservative Association met there along with the Primrose League and the Clarion Supporters.  It was also where the enquiry into the great burial scandal took place and even had a body laid out after a suspected suicide on the railway in 1901.

So it is fitting that all this history should be rewarded by a new exhibition in the pub.  Peter has brought along some of his paintings and I have supplied the stories and it is another of those events from the GLAD TO BE IN CHORLTON series.

Pictures; the Lloyd’s Hotel circa 1900, from the Lloyd collection,  a new painting of the pub by Peter Topping and a preview of the exhibition © Peter Topping 2012 www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20Lloyds%27%20Hotel