Month: November 2025

Lancaster Venues 23 to 25

This week I return to the Lancaster Live festival I attended in 2023 to review the final venue visited that year which was Lancaster Tite & Locke. This establishment opened on the northbound platform 3 on Lancaster train station on 8th April 2022. It was named after the original architect and engineer of the station, when that was first built back in 1846.

It is a very cosy welcoming bar with the wooden surrounds and exposed brickwork providing a vintage feel. It has four rooms, the initial containing the bar and the others named as first, second and third class lounges!

Tite and Locke. Image Credit flickr.com

There are 24 beers on tap including the five different variations of the very fine Lancaster Brewery ales, and they also offer a takeaway service in advance of your upcoming journey. There is also a large covered outdoor area where you can watch the trains departing to Glasgow, Edinburgh and the Lake District.   

We had a cheeky head wetter there when we first landed around lunchtime and had a relaxed hour at the end of the day prior to the members of our group jumping onto Manchester and Carlisle trains respectively. We managed to commandeer a large table in front of the small acoustic stage in the bar area.

The first act we saw was local band Diverted Traffic who undertook some cover versions including Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ including the amended line of the day which became ‘Shot a man in Tesco, just to watch him die’!

The other performer was Chris Barlow, who is the Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Cumbria and has been instrumental in driving forward the Eden Project inspired Morecambe Bay curriculum.

The commendable initiative links to place based learning including staging Glastonbury Festivals at the local Sandylands school featuring live music, songwriting workshop, face painting and weaving workshops. That sounds like a whole lotta fun to me and top trumps the double physics classes in my day!

When he needs what I am sure is a welcome break from academia he transforms by night into acoustic guitar man! He has released two albums, one called ‘Hiroshima Twinkie Sunset over Morecambe Bay’ which has tunes featuring lyrics devised by the afore mentioned Sandylands school pupils.

The other is titled ‘Lunar Landscape’ under his stage name Chris Twinkle containing songs with Half Man Half Biscuit sounding titles such as ‘Hey Jules Verne’ and my personal favourite name of ‘Iggy Pop’s Trousers’!

Iggy Pop. Image Credit madelinex.com

So, then I will move forward two years to Gill and I’s return to attend the 2025 festival. The event itself was initially under a modicum of doubt as the original organisers decided to take a well-deserved year off, but thankfully a separate local co-operative took up the mantle. They did a fine job with the usual 50+ venues in operation over the four days of the weekend.

We decided to avoid the risk of relying on train transport home and bagged a room at the Sun Inn in the centre of the city. This allowed us to have a full day’s gigging on Saturday and a half day on the Sunday resulting in a Jimmy personal best of 37 gigs and 23 new venues!

There obviously had to be the traditional false start to proceedings with our local trains having a meltdown, but this was swiftly resolved by an uber to pick up our connection at Manchester Piccadilly, landing in Stockport about 1pm. Our first port of call was the Lancaster Storey Café, where we attended a gig in the gardens last time, but this was the first event inside the building.

Thus, against the backdrop of cappuccino makers and tempting looking cakes there was a local singer called Grace Dawson performing. Prior to our departure we managed to purloin a programme with valuable schedules contained in the pages within.

Our next destination was the Lancaster Toll House Inn, situated near to the canal. There are records of a public house being in this location since 1820. There then followed many derivations before the Thwaites brewery owners undertook a £2m refurbishment in 2007. It was renamed the Penny Street Bridge Hotel complete with bar, brasserie, courtyard and 28 bedrooms.

Toll House Inn. Image Credit Visit Lancashire

In 2015, it obtained its current name reflecting the fact of its location at the original toll house, At the turn of the 19th century local football teams, even ones like Scotforth and Galgate which are only a couple of miles away, were quantified as southerners and thus charged a toll to enter into Lancaster!

It is a grand old Victorian building, and we saw a three piece self-styled jukebox band called the Beets who were actually playing as a duo on the day. They were exactly as they stated on the tin, by playing any song on request from the audience.  

A postscript this week is I do not think the pictures will display, which could be a pesky AI problem, so I shall endeavour to resolve for next week!

Manchester Venues 186 to 187

Manchester Central Libraryis situated facing St Peters Square. It was constructed back in the 1930’s and was designed as a columned portico building in the style of the Pantheon in Rome. It was officially opened by King George V in 1934 with the writer of ‘Dirty Old Town’ Ewan MacColl ensconced in the crowd.

Manchester was ahead of the curve in being forward thinking as the first local authority to provide a free public lending facility in 1852 and the opening was attended by an illustrious writer called Charles Dickens. The library then had several homes before landing at the permanent location cited above. It is now classed as a Grade II listed edifice, remarkably alongside a fellow 237 others in Manchester.

Manchester Central Library. Image Credit Time Out.

There was an extensive £40m refurbishment in 2010 which included resolving asbestos issues which appears to be a common issue with structures of that generation.  Prior to the renovation work the Library Theatre Company was in place in the basement, but the area was restructured as part of the library with the Theatre moving into the Home complex on First Street.

The Library Company had an illustrious history with Patrick Stewart (Jean Luc Picard) appearing in Billy Liar there in 1963. Others to tread the boards are Amanda Burton, Julie Walters, Bernard Hill, Liam Neeson and rather bizarrely John Noakes.

Many folk bands played the intimate 312 seat space in the mid-1960’s including the Spinners, The Oldham Tinkers (remarkably still active) and the Moston Brook Clog Dancers. Additionally, one of the city’s music shops ‘Rare Records’ put on lunch time shows for a spell.

It is now the second largest library in Britain and there are collections dedicated to the author Elizabeth Gaskell and the composer George Handel. There are also large spaces called the Shakespeare Hall and the Great Hall.

The Oldham Tinkers record cover. Image Credit oldhamtinkers.com

Beneath the latter, at one stage there were four floors full of shelfing totalling 35 miles length and contained an astonishing one million books. The humungous library brings to mind the remarkable ‘The Book That Wouldn’t Burn’ tome penned by Mark Lawrence. Methinks, that would take a little while to read your way through that lot!

During his school years the Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess was a regular visitor. Very periodically gigs have been staged including Slow Readers Club and Every Everything in 2014 and in 2016 Thurston Moore had a book tour date there and naturally Noasis performed earlier this year.

Another area is the Manchester Henry Watson Music Library named after the local composer who donated his works to the library. It contains one of the largest assemblages of sheet music and was opened in 1947 by Sir John Barbirolli, who was the conductor of the Manchester Halle Orchestra.

I have only crossed the threshold into the impressive building a couple of times, the first being for a photography exhibition and the latter to attend a show in the afore mentioned Music Library where I saw a combo called Jam Crew playing, whilst I listened and mulched around the bookshelves.  

The aforementioned Manchester St Peters Square was in the late 17th century located on the fringes of the town of Manchester with three open sides, one wending its way down to the River Medlock. St Peters Church was then constructed, and the square was named in 1801.

On Monday 16th In 1819 the area gained national attention for all the wrong reasons when a large crowd of approximately 60k protesters gathered to demand parliamentary reform. Astoundingly at that juncture only 11% of adult males had the right to vote, let alone women!

They were met with a staggeringly disproportionate show of force when the 15th Hussars on horseback were ordered to disperse the crowd which they did with sabres drawn. In the resultant carnage, 17 people were killed and around 700 people injured.

The shameful events were subsequently coined the ‘Peterloo Massacre’, the name being a nod to the Battle of Waterloo which took place four years earlier.  I recall in 2019 a memorial statue was designed and installed commemorating the 200 year anniversary.   

Nowadays, it is a busy transport hub with a large metro station with four platforms located there which was initially opened in 1992.

St Peters Square. Image Credit greenblue.com

When I was traversing the square a couple of years ago, I noticed there was a random event taking place on a temporary stage in one corner. I discovered the lass performing a short promo set was a K Pop artist called Mirai, who has appeared in bands called ael and The Hoopers.