Lost pub · Scotland Road

Spider & Fly

Gone about 2025

Gone: Closed around 2025
There now: Not established
Address: 1 Scotland Road, Stanwix

The bar at the foot of Stanwix, first over Eden Bridge on the road north, and one of the better rooms the city has had recently. It took the premises that had been the Hourglass and spent real money on them: gold leaf on the walls catching the light off the lamps, glazed white tiles, bare timber. Ilka Rhoades and Alex Murrell were behind it, with Ali Vaughan responsible for the interior, and the local paper made a feature of it when it opened in the late 2010s.

The name came from a Rolling Stones track of the mid-sixties, and the bar played it both ways: its own strapline was the line the Stones had leaned on, from Mary Howitt's poem, will you walk into my parlour, said the spider to the fly. The kitchen took consistently good notices for as long as it ran. It closed quietly. No announcement has turned up, the listings sites spent a year disagreeing about whether it was open, and the last dated post on its own Facebook page is December 2024. One customer, trying to use a forty-pound gift voucher, worked out what had happened before the internet did.

Sources

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