When I first took a picture of this pub back in 1998 it was called the Cauliflower Ear and I'd never seen nor heard of it before.
Then 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 the evening of Thursday 19th September 2002 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 Monday 15th August 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.
That's what I wrote back in 2011, but late last year I got a comment on the blog that the Eagle & Tun was back in business. Well, it's taken me a few weeks to get around to it, but here's the picture from Friday 5th February 2016!
I didn't go inside, but with smokers outside the door, it seemed to be doing OK. Hopefully this will be a long term going concern and survive into the 'brave new' era of HS2.
I also took the liberty of giving it the Photo Digital Art treatment!
It is now five years since I started this blog and over the coming months I'll be updating all of the Digbeth entries to see what has changed, what has remained the same and what has gone forever!
