No. 52 Telford's Warehouse

Visited on 19/5/11. This place is a sympathetically restored and converted pre-industrial edifice - an unusual grade 2 listed Georgian warehouse associated with Thomas Telford, which overhangs the canal and in it’s original form enabled barges to be moored inside for unloading undercover. The restoration has preserved many artefacts including a big winch which remains in the middle of the bar, but there are some modern touches as well, such as the enormous windows, which really open the place up and enhance the interior. It’s a beautiful building and is all the more remarkable considering the fact that it was almost completely destroyed by fire about ten years ago. In effect, it’s been restored twice ! As well as the bar, there is an upstairs restaurant and a stage with a bit of a dance floor. It’s a free house and is always stocked with real ales from Thwaites and Weetwood as well as a number of guests. We went for the Titanic, erm, forget which one it was ! It was towards the end of the evening to be fair. Might have been ‘Golden age’. Dunno. It was on fine form though. We then went for another guest beer and I haven’t a bleedin’ clue what that was, other than it was a wheat beer which turned out to be undrinkable. And here Telford’s scores really highly, because although they’d poured three of them and it was obvious we’d ‘had a few’, they replaced the duff ale with three pints of Cheshire Cat without question. Marvellous service. The only downside to the visit was the fact that there was yet another tedious blues band playing very loud dreary music. The dance floor bit near the band was completely empty as all the punters were forced up into the bar to escape from the worst of the din. The singer looked like Ron Atkinson an’ all. Great pub though, despite the best efforts of the ashen-faced racist's doppelganger.