Yes, I’m staying in Eccles. That’s how brave I am at 53. The Milton Hotel has a job centre and NHS facility built into it, which could be useful later.
Great view for £34, but the WiFi is rubbish, so here’s one from my phone.
A wasted £34, since the GBG pub up the road in Prestwich had decided to close on Monday. Mark E Smith would have been appalled.
So I decided to make an overdue return to Eccles’s undisputed classic.
No, not that one.
The one in that TV show.
Oh good, a mobility scooter.
The Edwardian bits people drool over are to the left,
so I went right where the drinkers go.
The public is classic Holts, professional drinkers, arguments about crisps, betting slips, Bitter.
“Can I take a photo please ? I’ll put some money in the charity box“.
That seems to work, and Christie get 85p, so we’re all happy.
The Bitter is intense. The banter is world class.
Arguments about electronic bottle openers, Party 7, and the lack of scratchings contain a more cohesive plot than the “Bodyguard”.
An Old Boy braves the jalapeno crisps (84p) and insists I try them. They’re hot. Really hot.
The confusion gives me a chance to escape to the bit you’re supposed to marvel at, near the billiard room.
Stuff that. It’s a pub, not a museum.
Two pints in 25 minutes, both NBSS 3.5, a fiver the pair.
And the best pub atmosphere you’ll ever experience.
retiredmartin 
Is the photo upside down deliberately? 🤔
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Dunno
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Posted while pussed. Shd work now.
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Upside down, weird filters, you get it all here 😁.
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It’s art, mate.
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“A fiver the pair” – but I can remember the outrage when Holts went over £1 a pint and that doesn’t seem many years ago.
Proper full sized billiard tables are rare and the only other one I can think of is in the Howard Arms at Bethesda.
Bar Billiards, which originated from Belgium and takes up much less space the more recent Pool from America, is sadly also quite rare nowadays,
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Yes, disgraceful. It was a £1 a pint in ’96, when Sam Smiths was £1.23 in Sinclair’s.
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Even in their “unimproved” pubs Holt’s isn’t the stonking bargain it once was. And in the improved ones a pint is well north of £3 now 😱
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Yes, Humphrey, under the Samuel name, gives us the proper bargains now not Joseph.
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I’ll say this, though. Holt’s Bitter remains a tremendous pint in a Proper Pub. I doubt Citra would approve though.
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I thought you’d taken the photo from your UAV but were struggling to fly it the right way up.
Lovely looking pub.
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I’ll take you there if you’re in Manchester. Needs to be experienced. I thought the atmosphere was pretty much perfect.
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Class.
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The bitter,banter and bogs winning combo of a simple boozer probably made your review of this Eccles pub a piece of cake to write.
Looks a belter.
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Yes, but I can remember when the Lamb was just one of eight Holts pubs between Eccles and Patricroft railway stations, all on or near the Liverpool Road, and they really did make for a most Proper Day Out.
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I once did a pub crawl of that with visiting members of the Deal, Dover & Sandwich Branch, starting at the Grapes and working back. Quite, er, challenging 😮
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At least we’ve known such good times that are sadly lost to the hipsters of today.
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“Quite, er, challenging ” makes me question what this country is coming to.
In our day a challenge was a pint of Holts in all of their Eccles and Patricroft pubs during one day.
Today a challenge is more likely to be having “to choose between a food shop or getting a long needed haircut” with having a low pay zero hours contract working in a high street barn.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/sep/20/wetherspoons-and-mcdonalds-staff-to-strike-together
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My 17 year old lad just cut his own hair. Looks ok and saved him a tenner to spend on food. I just let mine grow when I was his age, looked like Ian Gillan at 16.
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Indeed. As mentioned, I passed up the chance to luxuriate with the real oldies in the Edwardian splendour (if you saw Steve Coogan playing Pauline Calf you’ve seen the Lamb) and enjoyed the banter in the public. It’s a well-run pub, and the swearing is expertly rendered.
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Spent many an hour playing snooker badly on that table in the back room of the Lamb before going to watch Salford rugby league when they still played at the Willows at Weaste and the ground was two stops from the adjacent tram stop rather than a traffic-crawling bus journey along the A57 to Barton-on-Irwell.
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“Yes, I’m staying in Eccles.”
Wasn’t he the smart one in the Goon Show? 😉
As for banter, that’s a hallmark in my mind of a true ‘pub’. Don’t get that over here. Heck, where my brother lives in northern France you’d hardly call the various places he goes for a beer pubs, but they have banter. On one of our yearly visits to see our mother who lives near Toronto he remarked how no one talks to folks at the other tables.
When you find it over there, enjoy it. 🙂
Cheers
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You’d love this one. Getting offered a jalapeno crisp a highlight for me. Barmaid was wonderful too.
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