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Manchester has never been short of peculiar pubs. Ask any local and they’ll have a favourite: the Temple Bar, once a Victorian public toilet and now a dimly lit bolthole for the city’s creatives; the diminutive Circus Tavern, which squeezes punters into what it proudly calls “the smallest bar in Europe with the biggest welcome in the world”; or The Washhouse, which requires you to bluff your way past a fake laundrette façade before slipping through the door to a hidden cocktail bar. And that’s just naming a couple.
We’ve got historic pubs, cutting edge taprooms, clubs, and every variety of shape and size watering hole you could imagine.
The North Westward Ho!
A flyer for the North Westward Ho!
But as eccentric as today’s modern drinking dens are, they’re outshone by a long-forgotten 1970s experiment: a full-blown nightclub docked at Pomona, the North Westward Ho! Packed with six bars, a restaurant, a disco, and, most bizarre of all, a De Havilland Comet airplane converted into a restaurant and overflow dance floor parked up next door.
A De Havilland Comet in flight
Clubbers would clamber aboard the ship via a gangplank to dance, play pool, or enjoy a meal, while the airplane next door added an extra layer of airborne surrealism to the night.
The history of Pomona Island
In the early-70s, Pomona Island was not the gleaming landscape of apartments and tram stops it’s (slowly) becoming today. The Ship Canal’s heyday was long gone, and the docks were a quiet, derelict sprawl. But one man, entrepreneur Jud Evans, decided that the waterlogged industrial island was ripe for reinvention.
His idea? To bring glamour back to the canal by opening Manchester’s first and only floating pubship.
Jud found a suitable vessel, a former Ferry on the Isle of Wight , bought it, and had it sailed up the coast and into the Ship Canal. Once docked at Pomona, the ship underwent a lavish 12-month refit. By the time it opened, the North Westward Ho! was billed as “plush,” boasting a restaurant, six bars, a late licence and a disco. In an era when Manchester was just starting to embrace club culture, it was an audacious move.
And then Jud went a step further. To handle demand, he bought a decommissioned jet and parked it next to the ship, fitting it out with a dancefloor and restaurant. If you couldn’t get into the pubship, you could party in the plane.
A pint in a barge? Perhaps. A pint in a former toilet? Absolutely. But a pint on a ship, followed by a boogie in a jetliner on land? Only in 70s Manchester.
The North Westward Ho! in her seafaring days
It wasn’t exactly built with high heels in mind. Piccadilly Radio youth presenter Rikki Wright, who chronicled the era in his 2017 book The Dirty Stop Outs’ Guide to 1970s Manchester, recalled the hazards of boarding after one too many Babychams.
“The ship’s steps were tricky for women in heels or platforms to negotiate,” he wrote. “It wasn’t unknown for those having had a good night on the Cherry B to fall from top to bottom – and yet, the drunken body bounces, so most of the fallers seem to have walked away with nothing worse than a bruised bottom.”
To find out more about the Dirty Stop Outs’ Guide to 1970s Manchester, click here.
Inside, the atmosphere was equally raucous. Banisters doubled as slides during late-night abandon, low beams caught out tall revellers, and the gangplank back to dry land was a trial for anyone who had overindulged. It wasn’t glamorous in the conventional sense, but it was unforgettable.
Clubbers memories of the North Westward Ho!
An ex-punter who had his stag do on the boat told us the goss, saying: “Basically it was a big disco on a boat!
“It’s where we all went to when the pubs shut. It had a 2am license. At the same place they had a massive airplane too, but that was more of a restaurant.
“It was a great place for a dance and a few pints. I even had my stag do there!” They told us that they always had a great DJ spinning Motown and Northern Soul, with a great atmosphere to boot.
“It was a big like Fagins on Oxford Street, and some of the other clubs down there. It was a great place to be and a great time to be out clubbing.” Although they never saw anyone end up in the water, I’m sure plenty did.
“It was basically somewhere to go after the pubs, and everyone there was there to have a good time. It was still a bit of a barren area, like it is today full of industrial units and not much else.”
The North Westward Ho! is also said to have had resident bands, including jazz bands, and DJ’s spinning popular discs, including the “ever popular ‘Rock The Boat’ by Hues Corporation.”
The pubship was part of a broader 70s trend of experimental nightlife. Britain’s club owners were eager to stand out, and Manchester was no exception.
The Football League even commissioned a specially built “disco train” to ferry fans to away games in style, complete with a sound system so supporters could dance en route to matches. Against that backdrop, a floating nightclub with an overflow jet didn’t seem so far-fetched.
You can read more about that here
Pomona Island in the 1970s
Despite its popularity, the floating pub was never destined to last. The ship closed for good in 1981, barely a decade after it opened. Maintaining a vessel as a nightclub on the Ship Canal was costly and complex, and when the tide of fashion moved on, the Love Boat was left stranded.
Pomona itself fell back into neglect. For the next forty years, it became an overgrown wasteland, a strange, empty patch of the city that many people forgot about, except as a handy hideaway for illegal raves. Today, a tram stop sits where once a nightclub bobbed on the water, and of course, gnome island.
Ask someone today about Pomona, and they’ll likely picture cranes, half-built apartment blocks, or stretches of scrubland. Few would guess that it was once the site of a nightclub so unusual it made national headlines.
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