Don Miller's Hot Bread Kitchen ?

Hagenbachs (the bakers) ?

Thurstons (before it became Greggs) ?

The pies in the Coburg ... my word, I'd nearly forgotten them.
They weren't kept hot or refrigerated, there was none of that food safety nonsense, they simply sat under a plastic cloche to keep the fag smoke and sneezes off them.
Alongside was a squeezy plastic sauce-dispenser with a coagulation around the spout that might possibly have only been squidged that day but the gradual and growing (in more ways than one) accretion suggested that it was accumulated over several weeks awaiting a wipe with a dishcloth.
I used to have one of those pies every time I went in, just to maintain my immunity.

As I recall, other lunchtime food was ordered at a hatch.
I was often to be found at a table on the stage at the back, scoffing limp, pale chips and (because I was a trendy cosmopolitan sort of chap) lasagne.
You just can't get chips with your lasagne these days.

As I recall ALL the food in there tasted the same, it was the taste of month-old vegetable oil even if your food hadn't been fried, the whole of their kitchen must have been coated in decades old layers of grease - still didn't stop me eating in there though.

Don't forget the compulsory jar of pickled eggs on the bar counter - I once saw someone order, pay for, and actually eat one of those once, when the barman fished around in the jar with a spoon to pick up an egg (there were only ever two or three in any given jar) he stirred up a decade of scum from the bottom and the smell that came out of it was undescribable - the bloke ate it though - I was nearly sick just watching.

My memories of The Coburg are of Ed O'Donnell's jazz band and pints of Tetleys when it was real

Aagh BYB

I must confess, I haven't been up there since I went to see "Where Eagles Dare" at the ABC (I think it was an ABC), in the mid 1970's.
I'd be about ten or eleven

A bunch of us, courage boosted by being in a group of lads, went to see Chesty Morgan in "Deadly Weapons" there.
"A cinematic tour de force", "Groundbreaking drama", "A cert for the Oscars" ... were just a few of the epithets that never came its way.
Apart from us, the old cliche of it being the haunt of old men in grubby raincoats was disturbingly true, 'orrible it was.

There was another "adult" cinema in the 1970's, in City Square, known as "The Tatler Cinema Club" in part of the Queens Hotel building, it had been a cartoon cinema and, before that, a News Theatre.
It later went through a couple of incarnations as a club and I think it's a bar now.
I never went there, in any of its guises.


I am indebted to you sir, The one in the Merrion Centre was indeed an Odeon.
And the Tower was indeed in Upper Briggate as you describe, the other side of the Grand from the Plaza.
I believe that became [iMr Craig's[/i nightclub.

My memories of the Coburg as well as Ed O'Donnell was we used to go in there after our evening classes in the early 60s.Somtimes we had just enough money for a pint

Anyone remember an old man who used do gigs in the Adelphi and other pubs playing the spoons? (That's not a euphemism or drug slang, kids, it's just what he did). Think he was called 'Spoons', and had a younger sideman called 'Son of Spoons'.

I may have hallucinated this.

No but I do remember an old bloke named John Albert (or similar) who used to enter The Wise Owl talent contest and win it every time because everyone would vote for him just because he was so rubbish at his impressions - apart from Popeye, he could do a passable Popeye, but with all of his other impressions he had to tell you who it was afterwards.

My now famous professional guitarist cousin never got a look in, he'd enter every week with the latest tune that he'd learned from the "Bert Weedon Play With Yourself In A Day" book and be soundly thrashed by an old drunk who couldn't do impressions, every time.