Land O' Cakes

This unusually-named boozer was situated on the corner of Great Ancoats Street and Lever Street. Opened in 1791 as The Griffin with an attached brewhouse, it finally closed in 2005 after briefly changing its name to the New Land 'O' Cakes and then the Lord Atterbury. (The sign on the wall in the above photo was salvaged and finds itself on display in the yard of one of the flats in the Express Buildings, opposite). Towards the end of its time it had a fair few characters who frequented the place and wasn't the most welcoming of pubs in the mid '90s during our Oldham Street pub crawls. The fortunes of the building have changed in the last few years, and now it's a popular and quite superb Brazilian restaurant, Bem Brasil (previously Pau Brasil, changed for legal reasons), often frequented by City's Brazilian players (before they sulked and left the club).