There has been a pub on the Dressers Arms site since the 1700′s. Taking its name from the stone dressers of Slate Delph Quarry just a quarter of a mile away it started as a one room pub, where the workers would slake their thirst after a hard day’s work.Over the years the pub was sold from brewery to brewery and ended up as a tenanted house of Matthew Brown of Blackburn. In 1969 the pub was put up for auction and was sold to a publican from Leyland for £35000 who extended the building and made it a free house.Since those days the pub has only had four other owners, who have each made their mark by extending and improving the building.
In the early 90′s The Dressers was the first pub to have a Cantonese restaurant on the first floor and this has remained ever since. Always renowned for its quality of beers and food in recent years the pub has gone from strengh to strengh with it’s famous steak deal of two steaks and a bottle of wine for a reasonable price. In fact over 25000 steaks were sold last year.
On Thursday the 24th April at 5:30am disaster struck when a fire ripped through the total pub destroying both the upper and ground floors of the building. Over fifty firefighter spent 18 hours tackling the blaze but the building couldn’t be saved. My wife Trudie and I had to watch as twenty years of hard work literally went up in smoke.
That was three weeks ago so what has happened since.
Immediately our insurance were on the scene and confirmed we were insured and they would do everything in their power to get us back up and running in the shortest possible time. The forensic investigation took two weeks to complete and in the end concluded that the fire was an accident. In the meantime a specialist demolition team was assembled and as soon as they were given the all clear to enter the building work started on the big clear up on Wed 14th May. Scaffolding was erected all around the site and massive skips were brought in to hold the tons of burnt debris. A lot of the tables had cast iron bases, these have been saved and will be refurbished and used in the rebuilt pub.
As The Dressers was a very old pub it was in some ways inefficient for modern ways of working and we will take into account during the rebuild to modernise the infrastructure whilst keeping the appearance and charm.
Don’t worry apart from a few tweaks you will hardly notice any difference. This web site will be updated every week to keep you informed of the progress of The Dressers rebuild.
Sun 26th Oct 2014
Sorry that our last update was at the beginning of Sept but this has been for a combination of having to move our office to make way for LHK’s new toilets and the fact we lost our internet connection at the pub. However that is all academic now as things have moved on leaps and bounds with our opening date looming in 11 days. The pub looks fantastic as those who have been following Trudie on Facebook have liked in their hundreds. It has taken a mountain of effort and my heartfelt thanks goes out to all the tradesmen who have worked relentlessly seven days a week for the past seven months to achieve our goal. The phoenix has risen from the ashes and will be operational on the 5th Nov.(how ironic) please come and see us I’m sure you won’t be disappointed as we have combined the uld charm of The Dressers with the facilities of and efficient modern pub.