Farmers Arms, Bridgeman Street

The Farmers Arms pictured around 1973. The pub is closed and boarded up ready for demolition. Fletcher Street runs down the left-hand side of the pub. The large building on the extreme left was the Windsor, originally a cinema but which, like so many cinemas, ended its days as a bingo hall.

Situated on the corner of Bridgeman Street at the junction with Fletcher Street, the Farmers Arms was in existence by the middle of the nineteeth century. The Bolton map of 1849 shows the building in a sparsely populated area.

In 1886 the licensee of the Farmers, one Henry Tongue, went out of business and a meeting of his creditors took place on 12 March that year. [1] A few months later  - in  August – the Farmers underwent some external renovation work but one man was killed and two were seriously injured after scaffolding erected outside the pub collapsed.[2]

Licensee James Ramwell owned the Farmers in the 1870s but by 1900 it had passed into the ownership of a local wine and spirit merchant, George Munro & Co, whose premises were situated on Deansgate. It subsequently passed to two more wine merchants, Swan’s Vintage Wine Stores Ltd and Thomas L Robinson, both based in Preston. [3]

The Farmers closed in the early seventies. The pub is pictured here  by the Bolton Evening News in a story about the proposed traffic lights for at the Bridgeman Street/Fletcher Street junction. 

The whole area bounded by Bridgeman Street, Fletcher Street as far as Lever Street and up to the Park Hotel was cleared away around 1973-74. New housing was subsequently built on the site.

The site of the Farmers Arms pictured in 2012. The only common denominator between this and the photo at the top of the page is the traffic signal. The Park Hotel - Bridgeman Street's last surviving pub - can  just be seen in the distance on the extreme right of the picture. Copyright Google Street View.

[1] London Gazette, Issue dated 5 March 1886. Retrieved 29 March 2014.

[2] Annals Of Bolton, John Clegg, 1888

[3]Bolton Pubs 1800-2000, Gordon Readyhough, published by Neil Richardson (2000).