Lively discussions would have place around the insanitary conditions of over-crowded London, the country’s first public toilet for women, trouble at the mill, when the hell was football going to be invented and the price of the beer, all amid a general buzz of excitement as the pub opened its doors for the first time in 1852.
Maybe people had one or two and moved on, crawling the hostelries of the busy market town, perhaps they stayed the night, enjoying whatever entertainment was laid on to mark the night, or drank alone in a corner reading Tolstoy’s just published first novel.
In the ensuing years there would be occasions sorrowful and great as packed houses greeted Queen Victoria’s death, marked the losses of family and friends as world wars one and two ran their courses, cheered as England won the world cup, debated the closure of the textile mills, chatted over changes good and bad in the town, and eventually heard about the pub’s closure.
I walked past an old friend’s house, but couldn’t remember the exact number, somewhere between 46 and 54, I would hazard a guess.
There was snow on the hills and a cold, cruel and spiteful rain punctured my melancholia, stinging my face awake. I has thought I was sad, but realised that wasn't what I was feeling. It was just a longing for the disappeared, maybe not even that, perhaps just memories and a ruing of time's evaporation.
Time moves so quickly. I had told them that as we slouched against the wall - this wall that I am passing - almost half a century ago. The weather was so hot that day. Every second counted and we were waiting them, I had said. They laughed at me, but look where we are now. Or in the case of some of them who were there that day, where they aren't.
As I approached the Working Men’s Club I noticed the flag was at half mast and wondered for what reason. Someone would have died at some point, but was it that the flag had simply been left in that position as no-one had been in to raise it, or had someone unlocked the doors specially to lower it? Maybe, and appropriately, it was to mark the place’s sad demise.
Its recent closure hammered in another marker in time for me. It’s not as if I went in there anymore, after all I don’t live nearby, but my dad paid for my membership for my 18th birthday and my initial reluctant attendance turned into one of general acceptance and occasional gratefulness.
Where would the regulars go now? They won’t go anywhere as there weren’t many left. The work went and so did the custom, the WMC paying for its failure to move with the times, leaving behind an empty building that could become a great community asset. It won’t though.
Could it have ever moved with the times though? Has the pub that opened its doors that day in 1852 moved with the times? It hasn’t because, like the club and everything I note that has disappeared – the railway station before I was born, the cinema - as I haunt these streets, it couldn’t possibly do so. Nothing can or does.
The woman who goes in every lunchtime for three glasses of red wine as she reads and completes a newspaper crossword will have to find somewhere else to do so or something else to do.
It has always been this way, only we are moving towards a point where there will be nothing else. The pubs will have gone, people priced out of entertainment and football, shopping all done online, staying in the new going out.
"I'm staying in in," they will say.