Crooked House rebuild would be ‘very complicated and costly endeavour’

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Ever since it burned down and was then demolished last week, there have been calls for the Crooked House pub in Staffordshire to be rebuilt from scratch.

Andy Street, the mayor of the West Midlands, told the local council he wanted to see it “rebuilt brick by brick (using as much original material as possible)”, and a Facebook group calling for it to be rebuilt has attracted more than 10,000 members.

Historical pub buildings have been successfully rebuilt before – the Carlton Tavern pub in Maida Vale reopened in 2021 and was rebuilt brick by brick after being demolished without permission.

But while doing so is not impossible, it would be a “huge endeavour”, said Andrew Lovett, chief executive of the Black Country Living Museum (BCLM), an open-air museum made up of rebuilt historical buildings about four miles down the road from where the Crooked House once stood.

After dozens of calls for the BCLM museum to intervene and save the pub, Lovett issued a statement this week saying that unfortunately the organisation was not in a position to “save, let alone relocate, the building”.

“It’s a very complicated and costly endeavour and that’s one of the reasons we’re not in a position to just suddenly drop everything and go and get the Crooked House,” he said.

This week marked the start of the rebuild of Dudley’s Woodside Library on the BCLM site. The library has been painstakingly moved, brick by brick, from its original home.

“We have to number pretty much everything, from the rafter to the bricks, and take everything down one by one,” Lovett said. “The bricks get loaded in reverse order on to a pallet to help with the rebuild process at the other end. We don’t call it demolition, we call it dismantling, and the whole process took about six months.

“But Woodside was built in 1894 so you will get bricks and stonework that have deteriorated and are structurally no good. Sometimes, you can substitute a brick from an inner part of the building, or we have to get stonemasons to replicate things. Particularly if it’s sandstone, which is quite porous, it is susceptible to rain and frost and cracking, and inevitably you end up having to replace it, it’s unavoidable.”

Last year the BCLM opened the Elephant and Castle pub, a recreation of an Edwardian pub which was unexpectedly demolished in Wolverhampton in 2001 before it could be listed. They used photographs and archive material to recreate it as faithfully as possible, and asked local people to donate any old pub memorabilia, furniture or alcohol bottles they had.

“It was only possible really because we had architectural plans and photographs,” Lovett said. “We were also able to talk to the last landlords and families that lived there and say, ‘where was the bar, what did it look like?’ It takes a lot of effort but if you get it right, it can really trigger memories for people.”

He said one of the main challenges of recreating old buildings was making sure they complied with current building regulations.

“There’s quite a big staircase in the Elephant and Castle, a beautiful wood one, but it didn’t meet fire regulations so there has to be a metal one underneath,” he said. “And, ironically given the Crooked House, we have to spend a lot of money making the ground safe to build on since we’re in a former mining area.”

The BCLM has taken on such a challenge before, however, when it recreated Jerushah Cottage, also known as The Tilted Cottage, by building it on a foundation at a 10-degree angle. “It can be done, we just had to lay a foundation deliberately at that angle so that when the building was put up, it was 10 degrees off,” said Lovett.

“Some people think we’re bonkers the effort we go to get the tiniest details right when we rebuild. But it’s those things that trigger memories and we get very emotional responses from people when they see it. If you’re slapdash about it, using the wrong screws or brass fittings, then it just undermines the whole process.”