"Yate’s Wine Lodges, Ashton-Under-Lyne"

gelatin silver print

During 1982 to ’83, Parr explored the very British tradition of drinking in pubs, choosing to focus on a chain of public houses founded in the Manchester satellite town, Oldham, in 1884. Yate’s Wine Lodges are the oldest pub chain in the UK, and at the time of Parr’s setting about photographing every branch, most of them were in the North West of England. Parr was attracted to both their design and the rituals of drinking and socializing, which took place inside. He said, “the unspoiled, original wine lodges, with their high ceilings and bare floorboards, their pillars and rails for propping yourself upright, seem clearly designed for the determined and joyless business of taking the quickest route to oblivion.”
“The day in the life of a pub is captured, with people drinking on their own or with friends, the queueing system of drinkers forming an orderly line behind a rail and how the atmosphere changes depending on the number of drinkers,” explains Howes, commenting, “The images aren’t posed and show Parr’s interest in gestures, glances, movement and composition, which looks forward to his more familiar contemporary color reportage work.”
(Magnum Photo)

Although Parr originates from the South of England he can also be claimed as a Manchester man and a son of the North West region. From 1970 to 1973 he was a student of Photography at Manchester Polytechnic and throughout the 1970s and 1980s he lived in Greater Manchester, on the Wirral and in West Yorkshire. His earliest commissions were supported by Northern arts organisations and his first exhibitions took place in the North. Parr’s profound engagement with Northerners, Northern-ness and Northern places has been a recurring theme throughout his career, as demonstrated in his photo-story, Yates’s Wine Lodges, England, 1983.
Shot mainly in Northern towns and cities, this early photo-story examines the culture of one of Britain’s oldest pub chains. Established in Oldham, Lancashire by Peter and Simon Yates in 1884, Yates’s Wine Lodges spread nationwide, but retained a stronghold in the North of England, with its headquarters in Manchester. By the 1980s, when Parr was working on this project, the firm had become synonymous with what Manchester Evening News reporters describe as images of ‘a smoky, dimly-lit, male-dominated environments more in keeping with Victorian England’. These are precisely the qualities that Parr captures in his elegiac, black and white evocations. Despite the extensive refurbishment, rebranding and financial success of Yates’s in the 1990s, and periods of subsequent rebranding campaigns, this image still persists. 
Moreover, Parr’s photographs form part of a broader, more substantial, sociological shift that plots the demise of British pub culture, which has resulted in the closure of over 21,000 public houses to date. Although they embody, in visual form, an account of a national trend, they derive great potency from the way they present that trend by showing its impact on particular people and places at a particular historical moment in time. It tells a national story in a Northern accent.
(Friends of the National Libraries)