Tag: Dot to Dot Festival

Liverpool Venues 25 to 27

Firstly, this week I will look at the latest hostelry visited within the cornucopia of establishments within the Matthew Street enclave. The lineage of the very traditional Liverpool White Star can be traced back to the 1880’s and this is proved by a reference to the White Star Carvery and Bar within an 1887 Empire Theatre programme. It is named after the Titanic shipping owners White Star Line.  

Apparently, the pub in those days remains relevantly unchanged from today, apart from the fact there used to be a back yard and there was living accommodation upstairs. Astoundingly there were no ladies lavatories in the building until 1987, the wafer thin justification for this was due to the premise of endeavouring to discourage visits from the large number of prostitutes working in the city post Second World War up to the late 1980’s.    

After the war, a punter called Mr Quinn purchased five pubs in the city, including this one and on all that quintet he inscribed the word Quinns on the front windows. To a degree that name stuck to the level that the good beer guide named the pub as the White Star (Quinns 2).

The Beatles ‘back wall’. Image Credit pinterest.com

In the 1960’s, two promoters named Bob Wooler (the original DJ in the Cavern Club) and Alan Williams arranged for bands to play in the back room, and that is where the Beatles played their first ever gig. That room is also where the bands were paid after they had performed at the Cavern and naturally contains Beatles memorabilia, known locally as the ‘Beatles back wall’.

Apparently, Brian Epstein also discussed with Mr Wooler there in 1963 about their upcoming appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show which provided their first exposure to American audiences. On my one foray there I saw a local singer called Siobhan performing.   

Across town on Renshaw Street within the Grand Central building, you will find the Liverpool Liffey Bar, and as I am sure you can glean from its moniker it is yet another Irish themed hostelry, this time named after the river which permeates straight through Dublin city centre.  The plethora of such bars is no surprise when you factor in that 75% of Liverpudlians have Irish descent, the highest heritage of any British city apart from Glasgow.

The pub was subject to a long running rental dispute with a former tenant which resulted in the pub suddenly closing in March 2022, the disagreement also impacting on the Smokie Mo’s and Nelly Foley bars, which were reviewed in a previous blog. The Liffey was closed for around a year and grabbed that fallow period as an opportunity to undergo a £200,000 refurbishment.

The Liffey Bar. Image Credit liverpoolecho.co.uk

From a business profit viewpoint, they ensured that they managed to reopen in time for St Patricks Day on Friday 17 March 2023 and must have expected a busy one by stocking fifteen barrels of Guinness which equates to 1500 pints, you would be a tad merry after that! They have live music every night and on my visit, there was a singer called Paddy performing.

The Liverpool Sound City festival is an annual multi venue music shindig similar in structure to the Dot to Dot events. It was founded in 2008 and acts such as White Lies, White Denim, Gil Scott Heron, Swans and Hold Steady played in some of those earlier years.

It also runs in conjunction with the John Peel World Cup which is a British Heart Foundation led event where teams derived from band members and music industry bods play in a five a side tournament. It is a gala that I have always yearned to attend and in May 2025 that came to fruition.

Now, my football team Preston North End had proceeded to make an absolute dogs’ dinner of the end of the season, and this allied with some unfeasibly spectacular results from their rivals meant that the spectre of relegation had gone to the last game. Thus, I was nervously checking the scores on the train commute over but results thankfully went in our favour and we achieved safety. I could now relax, and as a result the first cold one did not touch the sides!

The hub points for picking up our wristbands and then our first venue was Liverpool Spanish Caravan. The bar and tapas restaurant is located on Slater Street, and the side wall of the building contains a large mural of ex Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp. There was a spacious indoor bar and beer garden and a decent choice of beverages.   

Spanish Caravan complete with mural. Image Credit liverpoolecho.co.uk

At our visiting time the singer on the small stage at the end of the bar was a chap called Oscar Blue who maintained our Irish theme by hailing from County Clare. He had a busker vibe about him and has apparently been a hit on social media where his initial debut singles have been streamed over 10 million times globally.  

Stockport Venues 13 and 14

In March 2024 Gill and I decided to have a gander at the events contained within the Stockport town of Culture Weekender. After some Steel Band action at the Viaduct Park, we continued up the A6 to reach the Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery located on the corner of Wellington Road South and Greek Street.

The gallery is this very year celebrating its centenary as it was initially opened on 15 October 1925 by Prince Henry. At the time, the local residents decided against a singular traditional war memorial and instead built this as a place of reflection and healing and to commemorate those lost in the First World War. They have a constant rotation of events and there is currently a special exhibition to mark the anniversary with items of hope featuring artworks from local artists, and it is titled ‘Beautiful Things’. 

Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery. Image Credit onestockport.co.uk

It is a neo classically designed building with ‘Rocky’ style steps leading up to the entrance and it achieved Grade II listed status in 2007. It has a marble paved hall and fluted Greek columns and contains four individual gallery spaces. There are plaques inscribed with the names of the 2200 World War 1 casualties and further plaques have been added since to include the later 20th century conflicts.

On the day of our visit there was a highly sobering exhibition in place containing health workers testimonials on their reflections of the realities of working on the front line during the recent pandemic, it brought tears to your eyes!

In the memorial hall at the rear there was a local musician with a fine voice called James Holt who was playing some acoustic tunes. I thought he sounded and looked familiar, and I later confirmed that I had seen him previously at the Tribeca venue in Manchester as part of one of the Dot to Dot festivals. Despite a pretty good memory of previous performers, it is an ongoing occupational hazard when witnessing the artists again in a completely different setting from the first time I encountered them.

Just off the M60 and within walking distance of the town centre there is a large retail park called Portwood. It has the usual ‘delightful’ retail outlets but has been enhanced recently with the addition of an M&S Food Hall, though a second mortgage is sometimes required to shop there!

Also, there is a branch of Dunelm where shortly after we relocated I had to navigate the traffic to make two visits in one day, as I had a ‘middle age shout out’ of having to return some curtains as I had measured them incorrectly.

Whilst I was searching through the tsunami of choices the curtains must have read my rare grumpy mood and all decided in unison to collapse on the floor around me, causing me to utter the phrase ‘For F£$%’s Sake’ rather loudly before stomping off in a ‘Piers Morgan leaving the ITV Studio’ style strop to the nearest lavatory to calm down. Not my finest moment, but undoubtedly my finest ‘Dunelm’ moment!

Arden Arms. Image Credit pubgallery.co.uk

As you head back into town, you cross the main drag at what surely has to be the slowest pedestrian crossing in the whole of Cheshire and if you swing a left on Millgate adjacent to Asda you reach Stockport Arden Arms. This Grade II listed olde-worlde pub was built in 1815 as a replacement for Ye Blew Stoops, a coaching inn that dates all the way back to 1650. It is believed to be the oldest hostelry in the centre of Stockport and there used to be five large inns in that vicinity, but the Arden Arms is now the sole survivor.

There must have been some nefarious activities being undertaken there back in the day as it used to have a secret passage that enabled punters to flee from any danger and which led them through a tunnel to the nearby St Mary’s Church. I cannot envisage anyone taking that route would then have stopped a while in the church to repent!

The story goes is that the original builder of the Arden Arms, George Raffald Junior, used to hide in the nearby trees to catch any would-be burglars and the cellar was used to store bodies during influenza outbreaks. The original stables that date back to Ye Blew Stoops days can still be seen in the beer garden.

Arden Arms beer garden which the stage normally located at the end of the room. Image Credit facebook.com

My initial visit there was to grab some lunch, at which point I identified that they stage live music every weekend. Thus, in September 2024 Uncle George and I made a pilgrimage there on a Saturday night and discovered that the small indoor pub opened into an unexpectedly large and very impressive outdoor space, with half of the area being covered in front of the stage. Thankfully it was dry and reasonably mild on our visit, but I did think that the heated sheltered space would be a godsend in the winter months.

On stage were Blues with a Feeling, a Manchester five-piece blues band named after a track of that name performed by Little Walter. They provided a pleasing blast of 1960’s Chicago blues inspired sound.