First visited : 6th June 1977
Now : The Waterside Restaurant
The first set of pubs listed in the notebook are those passed on a walk to Stoodley Pike on 14th October 1978 . It was actually the first Saturday trip since July that year , a hiatus caused by holidays, a weekday visit by my normal companion Patrick Brennan which ended up with him walking off because I wasn't paying him enough attention and both of us adjusting to our new school. 1978 was also the payback summer for 1976 with rain pretty much every day of the school holidays.
Further into the book there's a little account of the trip which unfortunately stops a mile into the walk which is fairly typical of my attention span at the time.
The Railway was always likely to be the first pub in the book since we had to go past it to get to the buses or train station. It was a relatively small Bass pub standing at the junction of Hollingworth Road ( I lived at 41) , Inghams Lane and Canal Street, separated from the railway by the road and the culverted Rochdale Canal. There was already talk of re-opening the canal but this didn't actually happen until the new millennium. According to the late Alan Luke's book on Littleborough pubs it was built and opened in 1870 by the owner of Ingham's Farm which had been demolished and replaced by a bungalow by the time I was knocking around.
The Railway first figured in my life in the early 70s when Mark Hurst ( who lived at the other end of Ingham's Lane ) and I used to raid the bins for bottle tops and were usually chased off by the landlord , Major Laycock. He was generally a genial old guy who used to walk a boxer dog past our house. He was replaced in 1976 by a family called Althorp who had a fierce Alsatian which unfortunately maimed Mark's family's cat. Even though it was behind big gates I always used to walk on the other side of the road while it was there. They later replaced it with a mongrel called Sweep which was bad-tempered but less scary.
It was during the Althorps' tenure that I first went in the pub as it was the venue for our road's celebration of the Silver Jubilee . Whether it was always intended to be in the pub or shifted there because the weather was dodgy I can't recall but the prospect of crossing the threshold of a pub for the first time was at least as exciting as the cocktail sausages and jelly that awaited inside. It was very plain inside, drably painted with high -backed wooden benches , not your ideal party venue but it was a pleasant enough hour or so.
When I became old enough to drink it was one I avoided precisely because I expected it to be the local of all the people who'd watched me growing up and you just don't want to hear embarrassing stories from your childhood when you're eighteen do you ?. So my next visit was probably in the late 80s when I started playing in the Littleborough Quiz League for the Red Lion ( which will feature shortly ) . Theirs was a strong side because they had one of those serious quiz anoraks in their team, a bearded social worker called Brett who probably wasn't a bad bloke but you wouldn't want to be stuck in a lift with him.
In the mid-90s it changed hands quite frequently and one of the new landlords earned some local notoriety when he started giving the regulars a tenner to go and drink somewhere else which seemed a dodgy business strategy for a pub that had no car park. I don't know if it was the same person that changed the name to the Waterside Inn in anticipation of the canal restoration finally coming to Littleborough but it didn't flourish even after the event and closed in 2003. It re-opened in 2004 but as a restaurant rather than a pub.
It seems to be doing OK but still has no real parking.
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