#032 Eagle & Tun, Digbeth, Birmingham : 1998 to 2021 (RIP)

 This will be my third and final report on the fate of the Eagle & Tun pub. This is from my 2016 write up: -

"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."

 

Since then I made one more visit to the Eagle & Tun, on the afternoon of Wednesday 11th July 2018, as part of one of the Proper Pubs Days Out - report here 

In the original plans for HS2, this pub was going to be preserved and become part of the new entranceway to the station. Unfortunately, as often seems to happen with modern developments, the preservation of old older architecture seems to fall by the wayside as plans get revised.

 

So, now we're in 2021, this is the scene that I found on the afternoon of Saturday 16th January 2021.

The Eagle & Tun was finally demolished in October 2020...another sad loss amongst so many others!