What future the Cavendish Arms popularly known as Clynes Wine Bar on Cavendish Street?

Closed and waiting a future, 2014

Now here is one of those odd pub stories.

My friend Andy came across the Cavendish Arms recently.

It stands on Cavendish Street and along with what was once the Cavendish Hotel directly opposite is all that is left of an older time.

Walk down the street today and you are flanked by tall glass, brick and steel buildings which went up during the cross over decades from the 20th into the 21st century.

Most offer no clue to what goes on inside and while they look like student halls of residence they could with a stroke of an architects’ pen become offices with ground floor conversions into shops.

But there is no confusing the Cavendish Arms.  For a start the old signage for Wilson’s Brewery is there for all to see, and there will still be plenty who remember it.

According to the wonderful Pubs of Manchester, Old and New,

“It's better probably known as Clynes Wine Bar, but it started and finished its life as the Cavendish - originally the Cavendish Arms.

The Sign of Wilson's

When Thomas Clynes moved from the Clynes Vaults on Oxford Road in the late 1800s, he renamed it after himself and it lasted well into the 1990s.  

Clynes Wine Bar was the most rough and ready boozer I've ever been in.”*

It is closed but I suspect will have a new life in the near future.

After all those glass, brick and steel blocks are home to lots of young people who will want a night out and something a little different from the Church Inn just around the corner or the tramp into town.

The pub back in 1958

So perhaps it will have a new lease of life.

And as if to confirm the possibilities for the future it is once again surrounded by buildings.  Back in the 1970s like many areas of inner city Manchester and Salford as the Corporation clearances of old properties quickened buildings like ours stood defiantly alone.

A decade before it was still squeezed beside other modest buildings and even gave up floor space to Babyfair.

If it reopens as a wine bar it will just be an example of continuity and likewise a lesson for all those who think the cafe culture was something we invented here in Manchester around 1994.  Old Mr Clynes might beg to differ.

Pictures; of the pub today from the collection of Andy Robertson, and in 1958 by H w Beaumont, m19055 courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Additional material courtesy of Pubs of Manchester, http://pubs-of-manchester.blogspot.co.uk/

* Cavendish / Clynes Wine Bar, Cavendish Street, Pubs of Manchester, http://pubs-of-manchester.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/cavendish-clynes-wine-bar-cavendish.html