The White Hart

A stone building with several past lives

The White Hart Inn stands at Lydgate in Saddleworth, near Oldham, and it was built in 1788 by a local landowner, John Buckley. The building has been many things since: the local police station, with holding cells and shackles on its top floor, a schoolhouse, a weaver's cottage, and during the Second World War a lookout point whose cellars served as a bomb shelter. The Buckley family held it until 1921, when it passed to Gartside Brewery, which ran it until 1987.

By 1994 it was a derelict freehold, and Charles Brierley bought it that June for two hundred thousand pounds and spent a further four hundred and fifty thousand reopening it in 1995 as a restaurant, brasserie and bar. He was twenty-five. He had started in hospitality at fifteen as a banquet waiter at Ashton Town Hall, trained with Embassy and Jarvis Hotels, worked at the Leofric and Parkfield hotels, travelled Asia in 1997 and served at Inverlochy Castle.

Gastropub cooking with moorland views

The kitchen works seasonal British gastropub cooking with local sourcing, offered a la carte and as set menus. Sunday roast beef, sea bass and beef Wellington are the named signatures, which is an honest list for a pub of this kind: two dishes everyone can compare against every other pub, and one that exposes technique immediately.

The house has never stood still. Brierley works closely with his chefs and keeps adjusting, most recently integrating the brasserie and dining room menus so a guest can order a la carte or take a tasting route from the same kitchen. The brasserie and tap room hold two AA rosettes, cask ales include a locally brewed Taste of the Moors from Millstone, and the site now includes AA four-star gold standard boutique bedrooms, twelve to sixteen of them with family suites in an adjacent cottage.

Log fires, snugs, and a function room

The room is cozy and stylish, with wooden beams, roaring fires and a country atmosphere, and it looks out over the moors. The capacity is medium and the volume conversational, with a pub side holding log fires and snug areas alongside the smarter dining rooms.

In 2005 Brierley added a function room costing one point two million pounds, and the site now hosts more than six hundred events a year for up to several hundred guests, from weddings to tastings to the hog roasts and pizzas of the Whit Friday brass band contests. Extensions have used native materials so the additions sit inside the Pennine landscape rather than against it.

Awards, and a refusal to stand still

The house carries a Michelin listing, Good Food Guide recognition placing it joint third in Greater Manchester, and a Pub Operator of the Year award from 2000. The Manchester Evening Post named it among the region's top five restaurants after it reopened.

What all of that measures is thirty years of continuous investment in one building. A derelict brewery pub became an upmarket free house with rooms, event spaces and a Michelin-recommended kitchen, and it did so by treating its own history, police cells and weaver's cottage included, as an asset rather than a constraint.