| Comment | Immediately before it was a pool hall, it was an empty and derelict shell, as was the Scotia below. The entire building lay vacant from the mid 70's to the mid 80's. The pool hall was first to open/"re-open", I believe, around 1985, then the pub downstairs reopened around 1987.
The timeline on the Scotia itself: First opened in 1792 then closed in 1906. It then lay vacant for 23 years before reopening in 1929. It stayed open from this point to the closure in the mid 1970s. Lay empty for just over 10 years and reopened in 1987 to present date.
As for the pool hall, which first opened in 1985...I'm not sure on the exact timeline. I do know that the building above the pub used to be several stories higher in the form of a full tenement (at least 3 floors of flats were above the pub). The door leading up to the 8Ball was the close door that led up to the flats above. When the tenement got chopped down in size to it's current 2 storey arrangement, I have no idea. It might be a case that there was nothing in the 8Ball prior to it being a pool club as it may have gone straight from flats to being commercial space. We'd probably need to go digging for plans from the Mitchell archive to find the time that it changed. |
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