#032 Eagle & Tun, Digbeth : 1998 to 2011 (RIP??)

When I first took a picture of this pub in 1998 it was called the Cauliflower Ear and I'd never seen nor heard of it before.

Then, in 2002, we stopped in Birmingham on the penultimate night of our trip that was to have taken us to Chester, but ended up with us visiting Leek. In my quest to venture into pubs that we'd not previously visited on our canal trips, we took a stroll into Digbeth and the Eagle & Tun was one of our stops. It was Thursday 19th September and as I recall, we had a great time in there and the place was packed. Notice how it has changed from being an Ansell's pub to a Free House, but inside it was beautifully tiled.

Next time I visited was a few years later, but it was very quiet even though it was a Saturday night. So now we move on to 2011 and it is closed. Apparently it shut its doors in 2008 and there's no real sign of it reopening.

If you panned back from this picture you'd see that there is very little left standing around here. About 100 yards behind me is the Woodman pub which is still open. I think the best bet for the Eagle & Tun is the new High Speed (HS2) Rail project which is planned to terminate at Curzon Street Station which is to the right of where I'm standing in this shot.

You can get a flavour for the interior of the Eagle & Tun here in the video for UB40's "Red Red Wine" which was shot in the pub in the early 1980's. Hopefully it won't be demolished, but I'm not holding my breath.