‘They picked the wrong people’: How locals at the Crooked House pub are fighting back

Traditionally, there have always been three must-see attractions in the area surrounding Dudley, in the West Midlands. One is Dudley Castle, which has loomed over the town in one form or another for almost a millennium, and now includes a zoo. The second is the Black Country Living Museum, which preserves the rich culture of the region for future generations.

“And the third is the Crooked House – those are the three,” says Lisa Newton, a fitness instructor who has lived in the area all her life. She pauses and corrects herself. “The third was the Crooked House… But now look at it. What’s left of it.”

This week, for unfortunate reasons, the Crooked House in Himley, also known as the Siden House (“siden” meaning “crooked” in the Black Country dialect), was the only place to be in the Dudley area. The 260-year-old building – a pub in various guises since the 1830s, famous far and wide for being left on a 16-degree wonk by subsidence – caught fire last Saturday night, weeks after it had been sold by Marston’s Brewery to private buyers ATE Farms.

As flames licked through the red brick structure, the efforts of West Midlands Fire Service were frustrated by vast mounds of earth blocking the only access road. Crews were eventually forced to use 40 lengths of hose to reach the pub from hundreds of metres away. Despite this, they managed to prevent the building being entirely razed.

Yet two days later, almost as soon as the emergency services had vacated the scene, the Crooked House was hastily and clumsily demolished by a digger rented to a company run by  the very same people who bought the pub. On Tuesday, South Staffordshire Council said the demolition was carried out without proper permission. Then on Wednesday evening, Staffordshire police, after inspection by forensics teams including a sniffer dog, announced it was treating the fire as arson.

But the locals and former patrons of the Crooked House didn’t need such confirmations. As one local put it, “this wasn’t just fishy, it reeked.” All week, scores have gathered day and night at the site of the Crooked House to witness a scene that they consider a brazen crime and an offence against their cultural history.

“People will say, ‘Oh, it’s just a pub’, but it was more than that [in terms of] how important this was to the community, as a unique piece of heritage that attracted people to the area,” says Mrs Newton, 42.

She would visit the pub as a child, walking with her family down a leafy disused railway line to come for Sunday lunch. More recently, she came in the spring with friends from Australia. A pint at the Crooked House was number one on their list of things to do. “You’d all want to roll a coin on the bar, or just see the wonkiness of it when you came down the lane.”

Children used to have their photos taken pretending to prop it up; the West Midlands’ own Tower of Pisa. The ancient pub even features in a Black Country rhyme: “Come in an have sum home brewed ale / Stop as long as you’re able / At a pub called the Siden House / Where the beer runs up the table”. Locals are understandably livid about its fate.

“It makes me angry, really angry. And we all saw it coming, it getting bulldozed. The way it’s played out, it’s just tragic. Everybody thinks the same thing: the owner didn’t want the building. As soon as it was sold we campaigned to get it listed, but we think they just wanted it their own way, they wanted it gone, sharpish. And we all know he’s involved in the landfill next door, so it’s all murky.”

The “they” she refers to are Carly and Adam Taylor, a Leicestershire couple who are, or have been, involved in more than a dozen companies across the Midlands. As director of ATE Farms, Mrs Taylor, 34, bought the Crooked House in July.

The pub was accessed by a lane owned by Himley Environmental, of which Mrs Taylor’s husband, 44, was a director until November 2021. Himley Environmental is a waste disposal company operated from Oak Farm Quarry Landfill, which surrounds the pub. The Taylors are also directors at AT Contracting, which hired the digger used for the pub’s eventual demolition almost a week before the eventual fire.

Lisa Newton began her day on Thursday by picking up fresh litter from what has been dubbed “Ground Zero” – the pile of rubble that was once the Crooked House. It seemed a futile task, to tidy up such a heap. “Well, we don’t want outsiders thinking we’re the kind of people who leave a mess, do we?”

Throughout the week, as locals have stood sentinel – in part to ensure no more skullduggery takes place, specifically the feared arrival of a concrete crusher – those turning up have oscillated between outpourings of grief, quiet nostalgia, sheer incredulity and utter indignation.

“We want action, ultimately we want it to be rebuilt, brick by brick like [West Midlands Mayor] Andy Street said. I don’t know why it wasn’t listed. The community’s got a lot of questions we want answers to, because this just stings,” says Alan Pickering, 48, whose petition calling for authorities to “investigate [and] prosecute” whoever is responsible for the pub’s demise has received thousands of signatures in just a few days.

The Black Country is the very centre of Britain: about as far from the coast as you can get, and – thanks to its coal, iron, brick and steelworks – one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution. The people here are rightly proud of that heritage, but to remember it requires institutions being protected and preserved, to help “braid” generations with a continuous story. In Britain, pubs provide that thread.

The Crooked House (previously called the Glynne Arms as well as Siden House) was opened as a pub a decade before the Black Country gained its name, in the 1840s. While subsidence made it wonky, it stood firm as an emblem of regional pride and was well buttressed - both physically and spiritually - against threats. To pick on it is to pick on the wrong set of locals. As one West Midlander wrote online this week, “The thing about Black Country folk is that we have patience, long memories, a wealth of resources and a dogged determination to relentlessly pursue a vendetta.”

Jamie Beddard, 42, is a local historian who has visited Ground Zero most days this week, asking people for their memories, providing context for visitors and pointing out particular period features he can identify in the maelstrom – such as thumb prints in the original hand-thrown bricks from the 18th century.

“There’s a lot of people coming down who didn’t necessarily drink here a lot, but it was in their hearts. In their grandmothers’ hearts, in their mothers’ hearts. It’s passed down the generations, [through] the stories told. It’s part of the fabric of the community. Even if they didn’t drink there, they still loved the Crooked House.”

It is this local pride and resolve – driven in part by a Facebook group, “Save The Crooked House – let’s get it rebuilt”, which more than 15,000 people joined in four days – that appears to have been catastrophically underestimated by the new owners when they bought the pub for £675,000, and soon announced it was “unlikely to open again”.

The Taylors, who live in a rural gated property in Lutterworth, Leicestershire, have yet to comment on the saga, but details about their life have been shared widely. According to social media posts, Mrs Taylor enjoys luxury travel, drives a Bentley and has an all-round lavish lifestyle, including once featuring in a national newspaper article to detail how she spent £30,000 on dental treatment to correct a crooked smile. In the article, she is described as a “mother-of-two”.

The couple have a history of run-ins with planning committees and local communities. In 2020, Mr Taylor purchased the Sarah Mansfield Country Inn, a pub in Willey, Warwickshire, five miles from their home. Despite village protests, Mr Taylor is alleged to have stripped the pub’s interior, before applying to build two properties in the car park. His application stated an intention to restore the pub, but a planning inspector noted the pub “may ultimately be lost” because there was a “lack of certainty” the works would ever take place.

Over the years, the Taylors have had several other planning applications approved in the Midlands, from transforming a Leicestershire quarry into holiday lets, where a resident complained to the council that Mr Taylor’s “attitude to managing the countryside is wilfully dangerous and chaotic”, to a dwelling the couple built in a barn designated for agricultural use.

On that occasion, in 2008, Harborough district council demanded Mrs Taylor – then Carly Gilbert – “deconstruct and permanently remove from the barn the structure [...] together with fixtures and fittings.” Three years later, Mr Taylor was reprimanded by the same council for failing to seek permission before turning farmland into a haulage yard.

In the Midlands, locals have noticed a pattern in recent years, when it comes to old inns. “This is happening a lot to pubs around here. It just seems odd how they meet their demise and then suddenly they’re on fire, then flattened,” Alan Pickering says. Two days after the Crooked House fire, another Black Country pub just 15 miles away, the Anchor Inn in Brownhills, Walsall, burned down. The building had been earmarked to make way for a 90-bedroom care home. West Midlands Police is treating that fire as arson.

Illegal demolitions are even more common across Britain, but examples of meaningful punishments are rare. Typically, developers hand authorities a fait accompli, then absorb a fine and move on with their original plans. But there are exceptions, such as the case of the Grade-II listed 18th-century Punch Bowl Inn in Hurst Green, Lancashire, which was bulldozed by Donelan Trading Ltd after the group ignored a council decision in June 2021. In March, five people were ordered to pay more than £70,000 in fines and court costs, as well as rebuild the pub brick by brick within a year.

Also in 2021, the Carlton Tavern in West London reopened after a dogged six-year campaign by locals. The tavern originally called time in 2015. After its owners, CTLX were denied planning permission to convert it into flats, and days before Historic England was due to recommend the pub be granted Grade-II listed status, the owners ordered its demolition. Thousands of locals persuaded Westminster council to act, and it ruled that the pub should be rebuilt “in facsimile.”

In Himley, locals had already sent a request to have the Crooked House listed, yet it arrived too late. Historic England confirmed they received it “at the end of July, just prior to the fire, when we were in the process of carefully considering it.” After such an application is approved, listed building consent is required for all works of demolition, alteration or extension to a protected building. It is not known if ATE Farms were aware of the application.

Between 1965 and 1983, the Crooked House was under the care of the Love family, who lived upstairs. The then landlord, Arthur, appeared in news reports detailing the peculiar angles of the establishment, explaining his delight at drinkers’ reactions to the optical illusion of marbles and coins seemingly rolling counter to gravity up the bar. Visitors came from China, New Zealand, Russia and America.

Arthur Love’s son, Ian, and his wife, Rita, paid a visit to the remains of their former home on Thursday morning. “It was absolutely brilliant when my mother and father-in-law ran it. It was always packed, and had such a brilliant atmosphere. We did it all as a family,” Mrs Love, 71, says. “They should’ve made it into a museum, and let people let people go round it – the floors were even more crooked upstairs.”

Ian Love, 72, who moved in when he was 14 years old, is not convinced there’s a point in rebuilding it now. “Wouldn’t be the same, would it? But it was magical,” he says, staring at the site. His wife agrees. “That’s that, I guess.”

What became of the interior of the Crooked House prior to the fire is another mystery. Locals have claimed a 19th-century grandfather clock was removed, along with all other notable fixtures and fittings, between the sale and the blaze on Saturday. Pictures shared on Facebook taken in the first three days of August show a space close to the bar where the clock had been. “Everybody’s keeping an eye on antique resale sites now,” one nearby resident said. “They’ll keep it hidden for a bit, they’re not that stupid, but they’ll sell it eventually.”

The police may be considering the fire to be arson, but there has been local surprise at the lack of security, police tape or measures of any kind designed to prevent people from tampering with the rubble. Some visitors have taken pieces of debris away as souvenirs, to the audible disapproval of others. Scrap metal hunters have sifted through, too, pilfering anything of note. The demolition job was far from comprehensive – some walls are still half-standing, and the foundations and cellars are relatively undisturbed – but a “brick by brick” rebuild may require a few more bricks.

“People are beginning to say, ‘Is it still there?’, so someone goes down to check the rubble,” says Amanda Inkersole, 56, who worked there as a barmaid in the 1980s and 1990s. “We’re now just terrified they’ll take it away. They never gave us a chance to think of something they could do with [the old pub]. A hotel, a BnB… They’d have won favour with the community and made themselves more money. But they never gave us a chance.”

When Mrs Inkersole arrived on Monday, she burst into tears. “I just stood there and I cried. It’s so emotional for us all. I just couldn’t believe what they’d done. God, I’m going to cry again now.” She is another member of the community who’s in favour of rebuilding the place as it was, on site or otherwise.

Justice and potential reconstruction were the main points on the agenda of a rally at Ground Zero on Friday evening. Ahead of it, t-shirts had been printed, costs of the rebuild job estimated, and labour offered free of charge by local tradesmen. At the moment, however, the rubble is still owned by ATE Farms, which is yet to send a representative to a meeting. “Let’s take this outside,” read the gently menacing tagline on the Facebook event page for Friday’s gathering. “If you aren’t there then don’t call yourself a yam yam [slang for someone from the Black Country] ever again.”

On some nights this week, a Mr Whippy van has been stationed in the Crooked House car park, so popular was the pub’s gravesite. “Bad taste…” one family muttered to one another as they passed it. But the mourners kept coming. Parents with their children; teenagers with their vapes; grandparents with their memories of the place.

One man, reflective in his railway worker’s overalls, opened a can of Fosters and sat at a beer garden table for an after-work drink. In a way, it felt proudly, obstinately British: you can raze a pub all you like, but you can’t stop the locals enjoying a pint there.

“Somewhere under all that,” a woman said, gazing into the debris, “is a match, or a rag, or whatever… A clue.” The people of the Black Country want answers. They won’t stop digging until they’ve got them.