DR PAUL JENNINGS looks back at the story behind the New Beehive Inn on Westgate:

A recent report in the Telegraph & Argus on the refusal of a planning application to convert the ground floor of the former New Beehive Inn to offices prompted reflections on its history.

It replaced an older pub of that name in 1901 when Westgate was widened, not, as is sometimes claimed, another much older Beehive, which was in fact lower down Westgate and was demolished in the 1860s.

Bradford Corporation had bought a number of properties in 1889 between Westgate and Cropper Lane from John Leach, a music dealer of Sunbridge Road. The plan in the Council’s register shows the new line of road running through the middle of that old pub. They initially leased it to the existing tenants, brewers Allsop of Burton-upon-Trent. It was the Council itself which then rebuilt it, designed by its own architect JH Cox.

The original layout comprised bar and commercial room to the front, smoke room and kitchen at rear, with music and billiard rooms on the first floor. The plan was to run it as a municipal pub but this idea was abandoned and it was let instead. A full licence was granted in 1906 to the former beerhouse on payment of monopoly value of £1500, which was a new tax designed to reflect the increased value of a full licence to a pub.

It was local brewer William Whitaker and Co which remodelled it in 1936 to create the interior which survived to the present day. This retained the oak bar-counter, back-fitting and bench seating of the original public bar but refurbished the back smoke room and created a concert room.

For a time in the mid-1980s it was renamed the Bradfordian, before reverting to its original name. Such was its quality and special historic interest that it was included by CAMRA in 2011 among the 119 Yorkshire Real Heritage Pubs. More recently it was listed Grade II by Historic England.

In its day, it seemed a thriving pub under landlord William Wagstaff. Until I moved away from Bradford in the late 1990s, I would often drop in late afternoon or early evening. Its varied clientele included artistic and literary types and a variety of music was on offer in the concert room. It also did bed and breakfast. I encountered a couple of Dutch backpackers playing pool one evening, en route for Haworth. The jukebox featured Crosby, Stills and Nash’s Wooden Ships, among other classics. Of course, it also reflected its location opposite the end of Lumb Lane. Early one freezing New Year’s Eve, I shared the public bar with a couple of young women trying to get their flimsily dressed selves warm in front of the roaring fire there, before returning to work. Over that fire was a wonderful old photograph of the pub with a full charabanc just about to depart on some long ago pub trip.

More recently, if reports are correct, that heyday had passed but it will still be a sad day if, like the Cock and Bottle, the other Bradford pub in that Heritage inventory, it is lost.

* Dr Paul Jennings is author of The Local: A History of the English Pub (new revised third edition), Bradford Pubs and Working-Class Lives in Edwardian Harrogate. Available at Waterstones, WH Smith and online.