Ghost pubs, car parks …... and the Hat & Feathers .... gone but not quite forgotten

It’s not much to look at I grant you, but Andy’s picture of the car park on the corner of Mason Street and Marshall Street offers up a ghost pub.

The ghost pub, 2021

Or to be more accurate the outline of the Hat and Feathers with the remnants of a bit of tiled wall which I take to be the lavatory. 

And because developers abhor city centre spaces, I am guessing it won’t be long till something new, big, and shiny fills the carpark and our ghost outline will be gone forever.

I passed the pub many times but never went in, which is a shame, because the write up in that wonderful site Pubs of Manchester Past & Present, reveals a lost gem.*

It closed in 2005 and was demolished four years later, finally finishing off a pub which was serving pints by 1825, when it was run by Mr. Hunt.  

He was the tenant paying his annual rent of £35 to a Thomas Welsh who appears to have sold the pub on to a George Eastwood who decided to take over the business of selling beer and cheer himself.  He was there by 1828 and may well have sold the place on to a William Rogers  who in turn rented it to a Thomas Doyle.

The pub, 1971

So far Thomas Doyle has proved elusive, for despite turning up on the Rate Books from the 1840s into the next decade, I have yet to find him on the census returns.

So, instead I shall look at the pub itself, which in 1851 occupied a large plot, stretching back from Mason Street and included a set of out houses separated from the pub by a small yard.

It now commanded an estimated annual rent of £40 which made it a cut above its neighbours whose rents varied from £25 down to £3, which  was as it should be, given that many of the surrounding properties were back to backs and looked out on to closed courts.

Sometime between 1851 and 1894 the pub was extended into the properties facing Marshall Street, and according to the 1911 census the Hat and Feathers  consisted of ten rooms .

There are few photographs of the pub and so far the one above from 1971 is the earliest.

Hatter's Court, and the pub, 1851

Leaving me just to ponder on the name of the place, which is recorded in the directories as early as 1825, and tantalizingly echoes Hatter’s Court which led off from Hatter’s Lane.

I suspect Hatter was the name of a building speculator, who chose to challenge posterity by giving his name twice, first to the lane, and then to a dismal court occupied by ten houses which faced each other and backed on to the pub.

I may be wrong, but there are enough people with that name listed in the rate books to open up the possibility that one of them may have built the houses.

We shall see.

Location; Marshall Street

Pictures; the car park, Marshall Street, 2021, from the collection of Andy Robertson, The Hat & Feathers, 1971, A. Dawson, m49747, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass  the same area, 1851, from Adshead’s map of Manchester, 1851, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ 

* Hat and Feathers, Pubs of Manchester, https://pubs-of-manchester.blogspot.com/2010/01/hat-feathers-mason-street.html