Tavern In The Town

The Tavern in the Town was a legendary rock pub in the heart of Wolverhampton. Through the late 1970s and the 1980s, walking in through the pub door which opened onto Queen Square – and which was the only part of the pub visible to passers-by – took you into a different world. One with Jimi Hendrix, Judas Priest, and Lynyrd Skynyrd on the jukebox, Newcastle Brown – or Tennants Extra – as the drinks of choice, and where denim and leather ruled supreme.

The Tavern finally closed in 1987, when it became Moriarty’s. This project commemorating its place at the heart of the city’s rock subculture has been made possible through funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, and over the past six months we’ve been busy researching the history of the pub, collecting photos from back in the day, and interviewing and photographing people who drank there and who remember it fondly.

We promised ourselves (and the Heritage Fund) that this project would: gather together memories and anecdotes about the Tavern; produce and distribute a free newspaper; put on an exhibition; and create and maintain a website which anyone can access. It’s April now, and we’re at the business end of our project, when the results of our work become clear. This morning, two thousand copies of our free newspaper – titled Tavern in the Town and packed with images and edited interviews – arrived from the printers. Over the next week or two we’ll be distributing them to pubs, libraries, shops, and cafes across Wolverhampton. Keep your eyes peeled for those.

We’ve also arranged an exhibition at the Mander Centre Community Hub from 19-21 April, so put those dates in your diary, and be sure to come along. We’ll be displaying portrait photographs and selected texts on the walls, and playing audio clips through a small PA. Copies of the newspaper will also be available.

We’ll continue to populate this website and make more pages ‘live’ over the next two weeks. Do check in on it every few days to see what’s changed, find out what we’ve learned about the Tavern, and see what memories it triggers. Once this project has closed, the website will remain live for five years, until Spring 2029. All the information we’ve gathered over the course of this project will go to the Wolverhampton City Archives so it is available in perpetuity.

For now, we invite you to enjoy the Spotify playlist of tunes which folk remembered from afternoons and evenings happily spent in the Tavern. If there’s a tune you remember which isn’t there, email taverninthetownproject@gmail.com and let us know, and we’ll add it to the list. If you’ve photos of the Tavern from back in the day, send them too.

cheers
Poets, Prattlers, and Pandemonialists