Manchester, Cross Street

Steaks and ale

How good to find, in central Manchester’s Cross Street, a building that looks small but punches above its weight. It’s Mr Thomas’s Chop House, and Geoff Brandwood, in the excellent handbook Britain’s Best Real Heritage Pubs, describes it as ‘an exuberant example of fin de siècle architecture in an ornate Jacobean style’. The walls are a mix of buff terracotta and dark red brick, and the curving bow, the mullioned windows and the elaborate gable all speak of the Jacobean revival. The front of the structure was originally a shop and offices, with the chop house behind, but now the whole of the ground floor is made over to eating and drinking – and indeed must have been so for much of the building’s history, as the interior looks unified in its decoration, down to early features such as tiles.

Looking at the details more closely, a beguiling combination of Jacobean and Art Nouveau becomes apparent. The decoration above the corner entrance, for example, combines a coat of arms topped with a helmet as crest, with a lot of curlicues: so far, so traditional. The mythical birds on either side of the coat of arms could be heraldic but also fit nicely with the Art Nouveau style. So, above all, do the heart-shaped motifs higher up, with the curvaceous bands that enclose them, which curl this way and that in a style that was highly fashionable when this building was designed in 1901.

What a delicious entrance to a chop house. But what, exactly, was a chop house? The usually definition is a pub or restaurant where the main item on the menu was meat in the form of steaks or chops. Originally, there seems to have been a sense of something downmarket about such establishments. In his great 18th-century dictionary, Dr Johnson defined a chop house as ‘a mean house of entertainment, where provision ready dressed is sold’. But by the time Thomas Studd set up in business in the 1860s, things were different. Chop houses were where Manchester’s merchants and factory owners came to meet and discuss business over a nourishing meal. As a form of pub, they were very much male-only premises in the Victorian period.

By the time the current building was put up, Thomas had died but his wife Sarah carried on the business with great success. She also transformed it by admitting women – a revolutionary move which must have caused much discussion. Many women were no doubt grateful, and this has a special resonance in Manchester, home of the Pankhursts. I have read that on International Women’s Day in 2019, the building was renamed Sarah’s Chop House in honour of Sarah Studd, but when I visited last month, the original name had been reinstated. Steaks and ale, I’m pleased to say, are still on the menu.