#101 The Patrick Kavanagh, Moseley : 1996 to 2020 (Revisited)

As our restrictions continue, I thought that I'd visit Moseley to catch up on some more relatively local boozers to see how they'd changed in the past eight years. This is what I wrote about The Patrick Kavanagh Bar in 2012 - 

I've known this pub from the days I was a student here in Birmingham. Back then it was The Trafalgar and for a few years my friends lived in the house next door (on Trafalgar Road). It was a lovely, cosy pub with several rooms including a bar, lounge and a small 'snug' room. That was in the early 80's and, as with many things, it gradually went into decline.

Some time later it was refurbished in an attempt to bring it back to life, which was successful in the short term, but it also destroyed the intimate character it previously had. This is the first photo I took of The Trafalgar.

We were on our Spring canal trip and, because of a delay at the Shirley Drawbridge, we'd not made it into Birmingham and so we moored up in King's Heath and caught the bus to Moseley for an evening of nostalgia. This was on Saturday 25th May 1996 and it was still called The Trafalgar.

It was a couple of years before we returned and the name had been changed to The Patrick Kavanagh Bar.

I'm not sure exactly when this was taken, but I do remember the visit which was some time in 1998. We walked in one early evening to be confronted with this scene - there were no bar staff to be seen, but there were two rather large Alsatians wandering about and a man lying on the floor, unconscious! We turned around and left quite quickly!

We didn't return again until Saturday 29th May 2010. This time we'd moored up at Bournville and after a visit to my local, the Country Girl in Selly Oak, we'd caught a taxi and gone to Moseley for yet another trip down memory lane.

This time it was a much more welcoming experience and the pub was quite lively...a vast improvement over the experience 12 years previously! (Still not as good as 30 years ago...but then again, what is?)

Finally, here is my latest photo, taken on Sunday 11th November 2012 on a stroll around Moseley to catch up on the pubs of my youth!

The Patrick Kavanagh Bar had yet another external coat of paint...and a new satellite dish. If you're in Moseley and on a pub crawl, this is another one to add to the list of potential venues.

The next time I was in Moseley with my camera was on the afternoon of Tuesday 12th April 2016 and there was little change...except that the large satellite dish had gone!

I happened to be passing by again eighteen months later and there had been a complete exterior redecoration.

This was on the afternoon of Tuesday 31st October 2017. As well as the redecoration, the name had changed subtly to just The Patrick Kavanagh (still known colloquially as Pat Kav's) and it was now advertising a beer garden (plus cask ales and craft beers!)

It was a couple of weeks ago that I thought I'd have a stroll around Moseley and take some pictures of the pubs for old times sake. In actual fact, I was on my way home from visiting my dentist. One of my (many) crowns had fallen out the night before and, although my dentist couldn't actually do any work on my mouth, she did provide a prescription for antibiotics should I need it. This was passed through the letterbox to me. So, I took a slight detour through Moseley to get home!

This was on the morning of Friday 17th April 2020. Very little had changed, except that upstairs is now home to the Fat Penguin Comedy Club, which is closed at present.

I deliberately took a slightly wider shot of The Patrick Kavanagh so that you can see the house that my friends lived in when they were doing their PhD's as mentioned in the openeing of my earlier piece. Just to bring everything full circle, on my last craft market of 2019 a woman bought my Photo Digital Art picture of Pat Kav's, purely because her house was in the picture - we had quite a chat about it!