When was the last time you went home?

Not to the place you live now. The place you once called home, but couldn’t wait to get away from. Sure, there’s a lot to be said about travelling to a sought after taproom beneath a railway arch, or drinking in your new local. But something I feel we often overlook is the bittersweet joy of hometown drinks; a pint in a place with which you share so much history.

Loss is a part of the human condition, but pubs aren’t human. Too often we have lost public drinking places to changes in licensing law, austerity and gentrification. Yet through the sharing of our history, those pubs don’t have to be lost forever. At least not entirely.

Memories of best bitter, long since finished, become our own and take on a significance that the original drinker couldn’t possibly understand. For example, I have a memory of an event that occurred around 50 years before I was born.

You might be surprised to hear a millennial like me claiming to possess a mental vignette from the 1940s, and the trigger is just as unexpected.

This was a story regularly told to me while eating my dinner (which in Oldham, where I’m from, means lunch) in the pub with my paternal grandma. Or both grandmas, a grandad and some stray cousins if everyone timed their market-day shopping just right. The price of that meal was sitting with her for an hour or so at that table—her table—next to the bar.

Every Thursday in the school holidays, I’d wash down the same plate of food with a can of fizzy pop. The cheap sausages were always processed to perfection and protected from the sea of baked beans with deep-fried, frozen chips.

Sitting in The Duke of York on the corner of Market Street, in the village of Shaw at the edge of Oldham in the late 2000s, I could see my 16-year-old grandma running under the window outside. Ducking down so her dad, who played the piano for the crowd inside, wouldn’t spot her. If he did, someone would be sent to collar her and bring her in, to sing for the room.

Now, my grandma could sink a rum and pep (that’s dark rum and peppermint cordial mixed together with a few ice cubes, if they have any) with the best of them. But sing, she could not.

I can no longer sit down for a meal with my sadly missed grandma in that pub. Just as much as I couldn’t literally see her running under the giant sandstone window. I am thankful, however, that I can still look at the building (now a shop), step inside, and remember.

I’m grateful for that, even if I have swapped my glass of Diet Coke and a sit down for a can of cheap radler, a bag of green onion Crunchips, and some memories.

***

“When should I return” wasn’t a question I thought to ask myself after I first left that former mill town in Greater Manchester, nearly a decade ago. After all, I was 18 and couldn’t wait to move away from the pubs and clubs where I first attempted to be an adult. The kind where you can dance without your feet ever needing to part with the eternally sticky carpet; so working men’s clubs, nightclubs, take your pick.

““‘Northern town is crap,’ said some Victorian from London, probably.””

There was Tokyo Project, where I got that scar on my left forearm—now almost completely faded ten years later—from slipping into the smoking area. Or The Castle, now demolished to make way for progress in the form of my town’s second attempt at a tram network. The Shaw Comrades, Diggle Band Club or The Cartshaft, where I’ve eaten countless packets of Smith’s Scampi Fries, split open and placed on the table to share.

There was something going on somewhere else, something better. Better food, better drinks and better nights out. I was sure of it.

I’m not expecting many people to have heard of Oldham, because why would you? Yes, it may have been the place that launched Yates’s Wine Lodge (which opened at 8a Oldham High Street in 1884, before going on to have 130 bars across England by the time I left school in 2007) but we don’t have one any longer. That piece of history was exchanged for a McDonalds in the 1980s. In fact we don’t have a whole lot. People keep on leaving, and drinking spots keep on closing.

It wasn’t always the case that significant numbers of the young and able fled Oldham, or towns like it, but it feels that way at the moment. The average age in Oldham sits at around 38 years old, whereas in neighbouring Manchester, the average is 33.

This isn’t a piece about if Oldham was great “back in my day.” After all, I’ve had people telling us towns like mine aren’t worth drinking in for a very long time.

“Northern town is crap,” said some Victorian from London, probably.

While I may be paraphrasing a bit, in 1849, Angus Reach, a journalist, sent by his editor, was asked to travel 200 miles north to chronicle the shawl-wearing drinkers of Oldham. It’s been a very long time since he was shocked by the “shabby underdone look” of our “mean-looking town” with its “airless little back streets and close nasty courts”, but I wouldn’t be surprised to read something similarly sniping today.

I’d be astounded if Angus wasn't greeted with a jolly well-made clog to the back of the head if that’s how he was talking down the Spotted Cow.

***

At some point, a lot of us, if not most of us who find ourselves reading articles like this one, move on from cans of soft drinks to something a little stronger. If I put my mind to it, I can still feel the sharp jab of a stomach ache I got from drinking way too many off-brand alcopops in a now long shut nightclub off Yorkshire Street, in Oldham Town Centre.

The places that sold me my first jugs of cocktail, with two straws for sharing, were the same bars where my older cousins first navigated ordering Mad Dog 20/20. Before us, our aunties danced around their handbags, Fosters and blackcurrant in hand, within those very same establishments.

Most of the friends I made these memories with aren’t around anymore. They moved away, as did I for the better part of a decade. I had no interest in moving home, until I did. It wasn’t something that happened gradually, as you might expect. One day I realised that I’d never quite settled; I’d been playing an unspoken game, moving around every few years in search of somewhere comfortable, somewhere called home.

I lived in city centres, trendy suburbs and suburbs which were always on the verge of being trendy, but never quite made it. Not yet anyway.

And I enjoyed the ease of finding exciting taprooms, visiting historically beautiful pubs and watching the natural wine bars gradually appear. We can all name coveted venues, and I’ll happily spend my money on a great glass of something, but is that really the measure of a truly great drinking experience?

After all, no one has spent a penny in the most well-known pub in the North West, and their beer is effectively apple squash. Not that it stops people from loving Coronation Street’s Rovers Return Inn; the public's idea of the archetypal northwestern pub.

***

I often find myself away from my home, joined by the wonderful friends I made during my twenties, enjoying world-class beers in some of the finest brewery taprooms in the UK, like Cloudwater and their neighbours Track, both on the same industrial estate on the edge of Manchester city centre. Or taking shelter from a rowdy London beer festival crowds in the quiet of somewhere like Boxcar, in Bethnal Green. I count myself fortunate to be able to do so, but more often than not this sparks a flicker of longing.

It’s that same longing I had as a teenager. The feeling that compelled me to leave the town I’ve recently moved back to. It’s the feeling, although fainter now, of wanting to be where the people are, but when I enter a fairly average pub, in my fairly average town somehow the smoothflow bitter can taste just as good as any perfectly lagered pint of kellerbier.

One day I’ll feel brave enough to bring people home with me. Inviting them to share a beer alongside my lifetime of memories. Who knows, maybe they’re waiting for an invite. The pubs around here no longer kick everyone out between three to five pm. We even have a craft beer bar in Oldham now.