A stroll down memory lane
From its beginnings as a wealthy cotton merchant's home in the 19th Century, the building has been through various transformations until it came to rest in our hands.
The pub has been owned by our family company, Stange & Co. since 1992. However, it hasn’t always been called the Jug & Bottle, nor has it always been a pub. 'Hill House', the original name of the building was built in the 1870s (although parts of the cellar suggest an earlier building on the site) as a home and remained residential for many years until the 20th Century.
In 1901 Meadows Arnold Frost, his wife Rosalie and their family lived at 'Hill House', a cotton merchant based in Liverpool originally from Chester. He and his family moved over to the Wirral as connections were made easier by the opening of the rail tunnel under the Mersey in 1886.
In 1921 a Major Pooley bought the house and extended and improved it considerably to become quite a grand family home.
Prior to 1894 local services for the majority of the Wirral peninsula were under the control of the Wirral Urban Sanitary District prior to 1894. Then the Local Government Act of 1894 created Wirral as a Rural District of Cheshire so local services were then centralised at county level. Then in 1933 this idea was abandoned and under the County Review Order the Wirral was split between the Bebington urban district, the county borough of Birkenhead, Ellesmere Port urban district, Hoylake urban district, Neston urban district, Wallasey county borough and the new Wirral Urban District.
The new Wirral Urban District required offices and set its sights on Heswall. It was looking at two sites; Hill House a private residence and ‘Heswall Castle’ a girls orphanage originally built as a house by Mr Tytherington in 1865 for his wife who disliked it and never lived there and so became known as the ‘Tytherington Folly’. He sold it in the 1890s and it was turned into a girls orphanage. By the 1930s it had fallen into disrepair and the Council decided it would have cost too much to put into use as offices. Heswall Castle was eventually demolished and this made way for Castle Drive and Castle Buildings on Telegraph Road.
So the council decided on Hill House. Who took about quite extensive improvements but not quite the sprawling local government metropolis they had hoped for with the castle.
The images show the plans that the council had drawn up for the amendments to the property.
In 1972 the powers that be decided to reorganise local government again, under the Local Government Act 1972, ‘plus ca change’. The Wirral Borough Council was created from a merger of the county boroughs of Wallasey and Birkenhead, the municipal borough of Bebington and the urban districts of Hoylake and Wirral. The 1972 Act also created the much maligned move for parts of the Wirral from the historic county of Cheshire to the new Metropolitan County of Merseyside. So Hill House became surplus to requirements, as council offices were centralised at Wallasey and Birkenhead and so was eventually placed on the market.
In July 1985 Hill House was sold by the council to a local developer J.L.Wilkinson Developments Ltd. Cheshire Hotels operated it for a number of years as the 'Hill House Hotel' before selling it to Bernie Inns, who we then bought it from in October 1992 and renamed it the 'Jug & Bottle'.
We purchased the pub in 1992 and we’d like to think we’ve made some significant ‘improvements’ to the old girl since then! We knocked the old hotel around a bit (well quite a lot actually) creating a new bar and giving it a new lease of life.
It soon became a busy and thriving pub in the heart of Heswall and was the popular "haunt" for many a local. Those who remember the Jug in the nineties and noughties will have fond memories of the Spanish tapas restaurant, and people will remember when the bar would be "ten deep" from early doors through until close on a Friday and Saturday night.
The addition of the popular tapas restaurant was a huge success for a number of years producing some delicious Spanish dishes in what can only be described as a shoebox of a kitchen, we look back now and wonder how they did it!
The restaurant then took a different path in 2007 becoming a British restaurant serving a great local steak. However the tapas was missed, so in 2009 Tapa Vista was born making a comeback of the popular tapas restaurant from yesterday year until it closed its doors for the final time in January 2013.
We decided to change tack in 2013 bringing a proper British pub to Heswall serving wholesome British food, local ales and quality wines. The pub underwent a sympathetic refurb tweaking the bar and restaurant area with the addition of rustic wooden furniture along with a sympathetic paint job softening the feel of the place as well as adding an interesting collection of art to lift the decor.
Three years passed and it was time to change up the old girl. We soon realised that our food offering had outgrown our kitchen and we needed to move it. If you remember where the old kitchen was (opposite the staircase) then like us, you wont quite be able to believe what the team used to be able to produce out of such a small space.
The goal of the refurb was to open up the whole of the pub and make it more of one space rather than the separate restaurant, bar and reception. With a couple of tweaks here and there along the way, we feel that the pub now has a nice relaxing atmosphere blending the cosy feel of the bar area with the light and airy dining space.
We have always had a handful of guest bedrooms upstairs creating a homely stay for our guests however with increasing popularity of our rooms we then moved the manager out of his apartment to next door and transformed this area into three new bedrooms meaning we now have nine lovely boutique en-suite bedrooms nestled above the pub offering the perfect weekend getaway or a quick stopover for those passing through.
Stange & Co. Ltd
Registered Office: 19 Trinity Square,
Llandudno, LL30 2RD
Company registered number: 639690
VAT number: 160 2262 07
Site design & build by View Creative Agency
