DR PAUL JENNINGS looks back at a Bradford pub which looks set to be converted into flats after a planning application to convert the property was approved this month:

A recent report that the former Star in Westgate is to be converted to student flats prompted a look at its history. There has been a public house on the site for a long time. A George IV pub can be found in licensing records of 1827, which was then briefly re-named the Earl Grey after the architect of the Great Reform Act of 1832, then the Acorn and finally the Star Inn from the later 1830s.

It played host, as inns did, to all kinds of social activities, like the dinner for between 30 and 40 Foresters in 1853. By the early 1880s it had, according to a piece in the Bradford Observer in September 1883 by ‘Saunterer’, the pen name of writer James Burnley, been remodelled as a ‘handsome new edifice which seems to dwarf all its surroundings’.

Many Westgate pubs had been transformed in this way, like the Pack Horse and the Boy and Barrel lower down what was a thoroughfare lined with them. Its proprietor then was Charles Pullan, ‘a thorough Bradfordian, a music hall manager, and a genial host.’ Pullan’s music hall, opened by his father Henry in 1869, was on the opposite side of Westgate. As Saunterer further described the pub, a place ‘where the music hall and minor dramatic stars congregate’.

Within little over a decade, Bradford Corporation embarked upon the widening of Westgate on its western side. The old Star was included in this scheme. According to the deeds to the pub, which I looked at courtesy the former Bass North in the mid-1980s, the Corporation in 1896 exchanged land, and paid £5,000 towards a new building and as compensation for lost trade, to Hammonds Brewery of Bradford, which had bought it some years earlier. A little further along Westgate, the Steam Hammer Inn was demolished for the same scheme but unlike the Star was not rebuilt.

The new Star was now set further back. My photograph of the mid-1980s shows the rather striking classical building displaying a star and its construction date of 1897. The by then blocked-up door to the left was into a ‘bottle department’, for off sales. The interior of the pub, also according to the original plans, was laid out in the ‘island bar’ style, in which a central bar area served a separate public bar and three sitting rooms, in addition to the off-sales area. This design, with its high-ceilinged rooms, together with their lavish interior decoration, was typical of the so-called gin-palace style of pub of that time.

It was a pub I only ever visited very occasionally in the 1980s, early ‘90s and it was usually quiet enough. It bore little trace of its earlier design. In working on this piece, I came across a reviewer from 2010 who described it as a ‘Very down to earth, old-style pub. Full of some real characters. Do not bother going if you are a poser.’ Which, depending on your taste in pubs, probably told you all you needed to know.

* Dr Paul Jennings is author of The Local: A History of the English Pub and Bradford Pubs. Visit pauljenningshistorian.wordpress.com