Day 597, The Victoria

A victim of the loss of industry in the Don Valley around Neepsend is this pub, The Victoria Hotel, also known by locals as The Monkey House.  Victim you say, surely just a change of use?  Well, there's been a decline in the number of people employed in manufacture around these parts and pubs don't get thirsty steelworkers nipping out for a swift eight pints during a break like they used to.*  So yes, maybe victim is a little melodramatic given the events that have happened to real human beings around here.

In the mid 19th century the pub was called The Victoria Gardens and backed onto what was estimated to be 900 acres of gardens.

It is almost certain that the gardens were more likely to have been allotments - allotments, virtually in the city centre, in one of the smelting pits of the industrial revolution, get outta here.  Anyone with any knowledge of the place would not recognise the description of it being gardened as it has been factory and industry filled since before the turn of the 20th century.  An area that would have been caked in layers of dirt from the smog, and with a railway yard right in the middle of it where the coal was dropped from - the coal drops are still there.  Nevertheless there is good documentary evidence that the gardens existed and that they were quite extensive.

After the Great Sheffield Flood in March 1864 many bodies were found in the gardens, bodies from locals and from further afield, the flood was very destructive.  The destruction of the gardens by the flood may have triggered an increase in industrial use of the area, trade directories from the time probably give some indication of this.  There is very little land here now that doesn't bear the mark of steel production at some time, and I can see no evidence of gardens, allotments, or other deliberately cultivated land.

I only ever visited this pub once, this was as part of a 24 hour pub crawl.**  In the 80s The Victoria was one of the few pubs that would open after 3pm, breaking the licensing laws of the time.  We played pool in the room behind the far right hand window and drank Wards until normal pub opening time, we then moved on elsewhere.***

This is the pub a couple of years before the pub crawl, it appears to be shut, although I expect that is just for show.  The Victoria did eventually stop serving beer, even out of hours, in 1992 when its reign came to an end.

* This used to happen, the heat from furnaces and lobbing huge lumps of red-hot steel around took it out of you.  Maybe they didn't all drink eight pints, but quite a few did.
** Small beer in a time where 24 hour drinking isn't an issue, but in the 80s pubs shut at 10:30 on weekday evenings and had to close between 3 and 5:30pm with an earliest opening of midday.
*** It actually required a great deal of knowledge, skill, and judgement to know where would be open at what time of day without resorting to the lowest of dives at any point.


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