Demise of ‘Crooked House’ pub is cautionary tale about loss of British heritage

The Crooked House pub — now just a pile of rubble — has unwittingly become one of Britain’s most famous watering holes. 

Because of its tilting structure, customers used to joke about feeling tipsy just walking over the threshold. The building, which dates back to 1765, was located in the small village of Himley in the West Midlands. 

On Aug. 5, an unexplained fire tore through the premises. Two days later, its remains were destroyed reportedly without planning permission. Police in Staffordshire in the UK have launched an investigation. 

Residents and campaigners say the demise of The Crooked House is symbolic of the destruction of numerous historic pubs across Britain in recent years and are calling on the UK government to introduce laws that would preserve these establishments.

Paul Turner, 58, lives two miles up the road from Britain’s “wonkiest” pub, as it was known. 

He remembers going there even as a kid and watching as the bar owner would roll a bottle upward along a table. It’s an optical illusion but it was a big tourist draw.

When you walked into the pub, he said, one door would lean to the left, another tilted to the right and the windows sat at an angle. A large grandfather clock looked like it leaned to one side but was, in fact, perpendicular. 

“Whenever you went in there, you sort of felt drunk before even ordering a drink,” he said. 

The pub is located on a former coal mining site and years of mining under the foundations caused one end of the building to slip down almost four feet. 

In January, Marston’s Brewery owners put the bar up for sale. Last month, word got out that the pub had been sold to a property company ATE Farms, who didn’t intend to keep it as a pub. 

Turner said he was gutted. He started an online petition appealing for the bar to be saved. But nine days after the sale, the fire destroyed it.    

Since its demolition, hundreds of people have visited the site, some placing placards with slogans like “More Than a Pub” and “Straight Answers for our Crooked House” among the rubble. 

Former owners Tom and Laura Catton said they were devastated when they saw the destruction. The couple ran the pub between 2006 and 2008. 

“I proposed to my wife here. We had our first kid here. So that was a lot of memories even after 15 years away,” Tom Catton told local media. 

Over the following week, stories emerged about the new owners. One national newspaper even reported that the couple had been previously linked to a landfill site that went up in flames without explanation. Police are treating the fire as suspected arson but have made no arrests so far. 

Last week, West Midlands Mayor Andy Street said that planning permission had not been granted to demolish the pub. 

The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) group said the destruction of The Crooked House is representative of what has happened to numerous pubs across Britain. In the first half of this year, 96 pubs were either demolished or lost to conversion in the UK, a third of them without planning permission, the group said. Fifteen percent of the country’s pubs closed their doors between 2010 and 2022, according to the Office of National Statistics.

Greg Mulholland, campaign director with Campaign for Pubs, said the penalties facing developers who demolish or convert historic pub buildings without permission are not enough of a deterrent. 

Developers factor in the council fines when they destroy these establishments because they know it will still be economically more profitable for them to do so, he said. 

“Until we have far greater penalties and indeed personal prosecutions, people will simply think, ‘Well, we can get away with it and ride roughshod over communities and local authorities,’” he said. 

Large breweries are also part of the problem, according to Mullholland. 

In the UK, many local pubs are owned by breweries and tied into contracts that force them to purchase most of their alcohol from that brewery or pub company. Mulholland said this restricts the bar from what it can sell and is often anti-competitive. 

The brewery that owned The Crooked House should have also made an effort to keep the premises as a bar, offering it for sale as a pub at an independently valued price, he said. 

“Marston’s [the brewery] should hang its head in shame for selling the pub to a property developer and selling it before the community had a chance to mount a proper campaign to save it.” 

If more pubs were owned by smaller breweries, entrepreneurs or the local community they would have a better chance of survival, he said. 

“There’s a lot we need to do in the UK if we are serious about wanting to preserve our world famous pub culture.”

Mulholland has written to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak asking him to change the law around pub sales. His campaign group wants any bar that is over 50 years old and now for sale to be marketed as a pub at an independently valued price for the first 12 months. 

Mulholland said the prime minister, like many other British politicians before him, likes to have his photo taken in a pub, pulling a pint. Britain is likely to hold a general election next year, and it would be wise for politicians like Sunak to have pub owners onside, he said. 

Local Conservative MP for Dudley North, Marco Longhi told a group of residents this week that he plans to campaign for a new law that would grant better protection for heritage venues. It should be named the Crooked House law, he said.

Turner has altered his petition to Save The Crooked House twice, following the fire and subsequent demolition. Before the blaze, his petition had a few hundred signatures. Now it has more than 19,000. He’s calling for the pub to be rebuilt as an exact replica. 

Mulholland said this is not without precedent. 

In 2015, the old Carlton Tavern was demolished after the new owner, an Israeli-owned development firm, was denied planning permission to convert it into a block of 10 flats. After a six-year campaign by local residents, the council ordered the developers to rebuild the pub “brick by brick” to its original state. 

“That pub is now open again and thriving, having been built from a pile of rubble,” Mulholland said, adding that councils need to send out a strong message that destruction of pubs or any heritage buildings will not be tolerated. 

The story of the Carlton Tavern gives Turner hope, he said. 

It’s not going to be easy building the pub from rubble, recreating its crooked structure with its slanted floors and wonky doors. 

But Turner said there’s no point constructing it any other way. “The place that we’ve lost, that is what we want rebuilt.”