Remote pub to be demolished in Cleckheaton for flats:

https://www.kirklees.gov.uk/beta/planning-applications/search-for-planning-applications/detail.aspx?id=2025/90655

This late 18th century pub, once home to The Brown Cow Pothole & Mountaineering Club, incorporating the Royal Antediluvian Order of Gentle Strollers, succumbed to Covid lockdowns and closed in October 2021 never to reopen.

Presumably viable until then, unfortunately housing demand being so formidable, even a relatively viable pub is more lucrative as a demolished and cleared brownfield site for a few new units. Sadly, almost every pub is a better economic asset as a potential housing site and local authorities need to consider this is their local planning policies.

Proposed is a simple stone building to provide extra care for disabled residents, and development of this nature should be supported. However the site could accommodate both uses quite easily, if the developer were willing to convert some of the pub for residential use.

Know as The Old Brown Cow on historic maps, it is the sibling of the adjacent listed White Chapel. New houses now surround this formerly isolated pub and church. In theory then, demand for a local pub would go up. Sadly, it seems that this isn’t the case, and the region continues on a path towards a geography of nothing but houses and amazon warehouses.

A history of the pub can be found here by the Spen Valley Triva Group.