Manchester's cherished 550-year-old pub that was doomed by The Arndale

It was the oldest pub in Manchester and thought to be the inspiration for television's most famous boozer.

When the Rovers Return was built at Shudehill in 1306 the Black Death was still 40 years away and William Wallace had been hung, drawn and quartered just 12 months earlier. But it's long history counted for little when the council decided to flatten a large part of the city centre in the 1950s and 60s during a modernisation drive that would eventually pave the way for the Arndale.

Originally one of the outbuildings of Withingreave Hall, a medieval mansion house that would later become home to the 17th-century philanthropist William Hulme, it's unclear exactly when The Rovers Return became a pub.

In fact the nearby Seven Stars, thought to have opened in 1356, also laid claim to the title of Manchester's oldest ale house.

But the licensees of The Rovers Return would boast that the men who built the Seven Stars drank in their pub, while it was also said the stonemasons who began work on Manchester Cathedral in 1421 visited the pub 'to refresh themselves with good home-brewed beer'.

It’s exact location is difficult to pinpoint, but it was said to have been next to the hen market and the original Burgess Bedding factory, somewhere close to the current entrance to the Arndale car park on Withy Grove.

Pictures of the pub, which was later renamed Ye Older Rovers Return, show a timber-framed medieval building, with a bowing bay window and three steps leading up to a central front door. In 1910 it was proudly advertised as the 'oldest beer house in the city', but just 13 years later it had surrendered its license, becoming first a workingmen's cafe, and later a bookshop then an antique shop.

By the 1950s it was known as