Top Sunday roasts and a beer garden like no other: Inside M.E.N readers' favourite pub

Wander into the Coach and Horses pub on a Tuesday afternoon and you’ll find half a dozen punters putting the world to rights in one of the side rooms or perched along the bar, chatting with landlady Sue Hawley as she prepares for a busy evening trade.

Inside the pub on Bury Old Road you’ll also spot a newspaper clipping hanging from the wall. Dating back several decades, the paper has frayed and turned a reddish-brown, but squint and you can still make out the words.

A window into the pub’s storied past, it was published some time after Arthur Burnham took over the pub in 1980 - “a real gent”, Sue tells me. Under the headline ‘Real ale buffs pick the Coach’, it reads: “If you like your pubs with that 'lived-in' look then the Coach and Horses is just the job”.

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Dating back to 1830, the building was once a staging post for the Burnley to Manchester mail coach and the current beer garden at the back was used as a turn-around for coaches. Its first landlord was Robert Bentley, the only brewer in Prestwich at the time, before it changed hands to Carringtons in 1879, and later Joseph Holt after the turn of the Century.

The clipping goes on to paint a picture of a pub famed for its sepia-coloured wallpaper, cosy rooms, and capacity to provide solitude “for the drinker who prefers to share his pint with people not pop music”. Fast forward to today and the Whitefield pub has changed a lot, though it has retained its strong community spirit.

It was recently voted Greater Manchester’s best pub by Manchester Evening News’ readers in our Love Your Local awards - a campaign launched to support the region’s boozers in these increasingly difficult times. It was up