Willington, Derbyshire : 1986 to 2015

This post is going to be slightly different in structure as a one-off. We've only ever stopped at Willington twice on our canal journeys with a gap of almost 30 years between visits.

Our first stop was a damp lunchtime on Monday 28th July 1986 and we discovered three pubs in the village, all extremely close to each other!

It's not very often that you can get three pubs in one picture, but that's the case in the first shot - the Green Dragon, the Rising Sun and the Green Man on the right. Each pub representing the three main brewers in Burton at that time - Ind Coope, Marston's and Bass respectively.

The second picture shows the other view from the Green Man and you can just make out the intrepid crew heading back to the boat after a 45 minute stop with no lunch! We moved on to Burton-upon-Trent to find food!

So, the question is now, how many of the three pubs survived to 2015? After not stopping there for 29 years, we made two stops in 2015! Both lunchtime stops, first on Saturday 4th April 2015 and the second on Saturday 28th August 2015.

#195 Green Dragon (now The Dragon)

The Dragon, as it is now called, is very much still there and can be accessed from the canal and from the road, but not the same entrance as 1986! It is now a more food led establishment that does very good trade when the sun is out! A brief history of the pub can be found on their website.

#196 The Rising Sun

Quite an impressive sight, but we didn't venture inside on either visit! Nonetheless, it is good to see it still there.

And so, we move on to pub number three - open or closed?

#197 Green Man

Still there as well!!

Almost unbelievably, all three pubs have survived and appear to be thriving! Back in 1986 the Green Man was a Bass pub, but now it is run by Punch Taverns. Although it provides an extensive menu, the Green Man still feels like a proper pub. More information is on their website.

So there you have it; Willington is an oasis of pub survivability in an age of decimation!

#145 The Swan, Kidderminster, Worcestershire : 2008 to 2013

Kidderminster isn't a place we often stop at on our canal trips being too close to Stourport. However, on both occasions that we did stop there we visited The Swan in the centre of the town.

This first visit was on the evening of Monday 26th May 2008. As I recall it was a reasonably lively, typically town centre pub where we had a pint and resumed our pub crawl.

Upon our return to Kidderminster, there was quite a change in the exterior appearance of The Swan.

This was at lunchtime on Thursday 16th May 2013 - what a transformation! Inside, the layout was pretty much the same, but I assume it had also been refurbished. There was quite an extensive menu of 'proper' pub food (including a 'build your own' sandwich feature), so we stayed and had lunch there. Although it looks to be an independent pub, it is part of Punch Taverns, a detail which is buried deep within The Swan website.