The Woolcomber, Kettering, Northamptonshire

You wait and you wait for a Kettering pub to come along...

I guess this short post could be seen as a companion piece to the one I posted recently on the Stirrup Cup in (very) nearby Barton Seagrave, indeed I was pretty keen to compare these two very similar late 20th century pubs. Since the Leather Crafstman pub closed and was subsequently demolished in 2017, The Woolcomber finds itself as the last surviving pub on the Ise Lodge Estate. Leather Craftsman aside, Ketterings estate pubs have faired better than most in recent years. Very few have in fact closed, and most have seen significant investment from their pubco owners in recent years. These Kettering pubs seem to be valued by both owners and locals alike, and it probably helps their cause that the areas they serve are not especially over-pubbed.

Just a decade separates the construction of the Stirrup Cup and the Woolcomber, both of which opened at a time when utilitarian estate pubs like these were springing up all over the place, built to serve the needs of the rapid growth in post-war housing. By happenchance, both these pubs have also received a fairly recent refurbishment after many years of neglect. So far, so similar...

By the time the Woolcomber was built in 1975, most of the smaller regional brewers had fallen prey to national concerns, and it's not entirely clear to me who built the pub. By the early 90's it was listed in a local CAMRA pub guide as serving Home Bitter, but at this time Nottinghams Home Ales were firmly in the hands of the huge Scottish & Newcastle conglomerate. Unlikely as it may seem given the pubs distance from the brewerys base to the north of Nottingham, it's quite likely that Home Ales did indeed commission the Woolcomber. Because alongside local rivals Hardys & Hansons, and to a lesser extent Everards of Leicester, it was mostly regional brewers that were actively building new pubs at this time, and Home Ales reach extended throughout the East Midlands, and certainly as far as Northamptonshire.

Often these new-build pubs were nothing much to look at from the outside at least, and certainly by the standards of the opulent town-centre Victorian and Edwardian boozers that survived the war years. Indeed the Woolcomber was a classic 70's 'flat-roof' construction, sitting on a large car park in view of the other essential amenities of the day, the Chippy, Newsagent, and a small local Supermarket. The current appearance of the pub has been greatly enhanced by the addition of weatherboarding, a good move I think!

Multi-room pubs were the norm back then, and the Woolcomer, in common with the Stirrup Cup, was built as a traditional 'bar and lounge' pub. The scourge of knocking pubs through into one, large, easy to manage room, was just taking hold in the 70's, becoming an unfortunate epidemic in the 80's. Though the Woolcomber retained its original two-room layout throughout this period, sadly during the 2016 refurbishment it was decided to remove the wall that divided the bar and lounge. So the Woolcomber is a single room pub now, but with two quite distinct areas. This is perhaps the only major difference between the Woolcomber and its near-neighbour the Stirrup Cup which retains a separate bar and lounge.

The bar area to the front of the pub (above) is clearly the social heart of the pub, and now fulfils the need that all suburban pubs like the Woolcomber have, for comfortable dining as opposed to the purely social drinking that dominated estate pubs like this in years gone by. It's here that the recent refurbishment of the pub has had the most impact, turning what was a rapidly declining and largely unloved local boozer into an attractive and comfortable dining pub fit for the 21st century.

The slightly smaller space toward the rear of the pub is the games area, featuring a Dartboard, Pool Table, and the local speciality, a well-maintained Northamptonshire Skittles Table. This one is a W T Black & Son model, itself only recently refurbished. The stencilled serial numbers underneath suggest the table was constructed in 1972 (below), so it's quite possible that this skittles table has been at the Woolcomber from the time the pub opened back in the 70's.

Unsurprisingly for a pub in a residential area like this, there's no shortage of television screens dotted about the place. It's hard to imagine how a pub like the Woolcomber would survive without televised sport to draw the crowds in, and the same could be said for the pubs traditional games, all of which see regular service in local leagues. The Skittles teams are currently playing on Monday nights in the Kettering, Burton Latimer & District Skittles Winter League.