Lost pub · West Walls

The Wheel

Gone 2008

Gone: Closed for good in 2008
There now: West Walls Brewing Co., brewing in the building since 2024
Where exactly: On West Walls. The exact spot isn't known, so the pin marks the street, not the building.

The building began as a school. The building went up in 1814 as the Central School, was taken over by the Fawcett School in 1883, and closed as a school on 31 August 1909.

Its nightlife begins around 1970: a 2022 sale account has it opening that year as the Pink Panther and renamed the Twisted Wheel four years later, while the city's own minutes of 30 March 1972 approved its ground floor for record sales by day and a coffee bar by night. By 9 November 1973, when a kitchen extension went in, it was already trading under a spelling close enough to tell you how everyone actually said it: the 'Twister Wheel'.

Wednesdays and Saturdays, and regulars carried a Wheel card. It opened at ten and you were reckoned deeply uncool if you turned up before eleven. Fifty pence shots, pound bottles, snakebite and black, graffiti an inch thick in the toilets, zebra-painted walls, girls crying on the stairs, and a woman called Margaret serving undercooked chips in the back. At some point it also traded as Legends.

In 2002 it was gutted and reopened over three floors: XS upstairs in what had been Big Softies, the Lizard Lounge in the middle, a modern basement. The sticky floors went and so, before long, did the trade. It lost its DJs to TC's before the end, and it shut for good in 2008. The XS that opened in that refit is Club XS, which went when the building did. In September 2022 the building, 16,800 square feet over four levels, went to auction at £175,000, with consent for four shops and two flats on two floors and a nightclub on the other two.

Know anything about this one?

What's above is everything on file, and it isn't much. If you drank in it, or your family did, or you've a photograph of it, that's more than the records hold.

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