Building record 15038 - The Bleeding Wolf Public House, 121 Congleton Road North, Scholar Green

<1> English Heritage, 2005, List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest, 1400540 (Digital Archive). SCH4666.

Grade II Listed Public House. Built in 1936 to designs by J H Walters for Robinson's Brewery of Stockport. It was an entirely new building replacing an earlier pub shown on the 1:2500 Ordnance survey map of 1884 and identified as the Bleeding Wolf Inn. The earlier pub had been acquired in 1935 during a period when the brewery was expanding into rural areas under the chairmanship of John Robinson in a policy aimed at developing a new family market. The new pub was designed by J H Walters as an 'improved' roadside public house with a large car park to its rear, and was one of four he designed for Robinsons. The Legs of Man, Arclid, Cheshire on the A50, and the Church House Inn, Buglawton near Congleton, Cheshire on the A54 were designed in a similar style. The pub's unusual name is said to derive from a legend where Adam de Lauton rescued either King John, or alternately the Earl of Chester, from attack by a wounded wolf and in gratitude was granted a thousand acres stretching from Sandbach to Congleton (the Parish of Lauton, later Church Lawton), or as much land as he could walk over in a week. The bleeding wolf was incorporated into the Lawton family coat of arms and the incident was said to have been commemorated at that time by the building of a pub named the 'Inn of the Bleeding Wolf' where the incident occurred.

A purpose-built inter-war 'improved' public house with a range of rooms for different functions and clientele. Design: Vernacular Revival style, aimed at creating a sense of historical permanence and hence respectability, situated in a large car park to expand the clientele base by attracting motorists on the newly upgraded A34. Interior: designed in a nostalgic 'publican's rustic' with plentiful use of adzed timberwork applied to walls, ceilings, seating, curved, lapped bar counter, and splat balusters of staircase. Intactness: externally the only one of three similar pubs designed by Walters for Robinsons to retain a thatched roof, with a largely unaltered interior including inglenook fireplace, stone fireplaces, more 'genteel' panelling to smoke room, original doors and fixed seating, coloured and painted glass depicting Robinson's bottles, a pint mug of beer, and the eponymous wolf, original tiling in the wcs, and leaded sliding sash counter screens.

<2> Graeme Ives Heritage Planning Ltd., 2019, Heritage Statement: The Bleeding Wolf Public House, 121 Congleton Road North, Scholar Green, R4382 (Client Report). SCH8801.

A heritage assessment was produced in 2019 in support of a series of proposed internal and external alterations at the Grade II Listed Bleeding Wolf Public House, Scholar Green, near Kidsgrove. It was listed in 2011 as a a purpose-built, inter-war, ‘improved’ public house with a range of rooms for different functions and clientele. It has white-painted, rendered elevations with orange corbelled brick stacks and matching sills and a deep thatched roof. The Bleeding Wolf was designed by the architect James Henry Walters, who designed several other pubs for Robinson’s Brewery around the time of the Bleeding Wolf.