Thomas and Sarah
Thomas Studd was from Shoreditch, a young chef who came to Manchester and worked in the chop houses that fed the city's clerks, merchants, and tradesmen. He married Sarah Townsend, a Yorkshire farmer's daughter, in 1855 at All Saints, Chorlton-on-Medlock, and they set up home on Derby Lane in Cheetham. In 1867, they opened their own place on Cross Street, opposite the original Town Hall and the Cross Street Chapel. They called it Mr Thomas's Chop House.
Sam's Chop House followed in 1872, opening in a basement on Market Street near the Royal Exchange. Who Sam was is disputed: the pub's own ancestry research says it was named after Thomas and Sarah's second son, Samuel, born 1864, while other accounts say Thomas's brother. The pubs disagree about their own family tree, which is the most Manchester thing imaginable. Sam's closed in 1996 and reopened in 2001, but both are still there. But Mr Thomas's came first.
Thomas was too ill to work by 1875 and died on 11 March 1880, aged forty-five. Sarah took over the business while raising seven children. She ran it for fifteen years, then handed over to her daughter, also Sarah, who ran it until 1900. The honours board in the pub lists both. Since 2018, the pub has been renamed Sarah's Chop House for International Women's Day, honouring the women who kept the whole thing going at a time when women were not even allowed inside most chop houses as customers.
Robert Walker's Building
The building you see today is not the one Thomas and Sarah opened. Tom's closed in 1900 and the architect Robert Walker was commissioned to rebuild and extend the original premises. The gable is dated 1901; the pub reopened in 1902 under Frank Willoughby and James Binney. Willoughby ran a wine business from the premises until 1942, a name that still means wine in Manchester. What Walker produced was a cast iron frame building, its exterior a mixture of decorative terracotta blocks and Accrington brick, with Art Nouveau motifs worked into the facade. The site had originally been a Georgian town house, which is why Mr Thomas's is long and narrow, four rooms deep, one behind the other, running back from Cross Street like a corridor with ambitions.
The interior is the thing. Four spaces divided by light green ceramic arches, with a matching dado running along the walls. The floor is black and white tiles laid in a diamond pattern, running the full length of the building. The arches and tiling are Mr Thomas's principal distinguishing features. They have been cleaned and restored over the years, but the bones are original, and the effect is the same as it was in 1902: you walk in from Cross Street and the green tiles pull you through the building like a tunnel made of porcelain.
The Hash
Mr Thomas's has served food for over 150 years, and for most of that time the menu has not strayed far from its origins. This is a chop house. The clue is in the name. Pies, chops, puddings, and the dish that has become the pub's signature: the corned beef hash, topped with a poached egg and bacon, ten days in the making. It is not a complicated dish. It is not trying to be. It is the kind of food that Victorian Manchester ran on, updated just enough to justify the price and not so much that the regulars would notice.
L.S. Lowry was a regular not at Tom's but at Sam's around the corner, where his art school friend A.H. Knowles was proprietor. Lowry used to doodle on napkins and give the drawings away as tips. A bronze of him still sits at Sam's bar. The two chop houses sat at the centre of a version of Manchester that Lowry painted better than anyone: a working city that fed itself quickly, cheaply, and without ceremony. Mr Thomas's still has that energy, even if the prices have moved on. The green tiles do not care what year it is.
The green tiles do not care what year it is.
Cross Street
Cross Street was laid out in the early eighteenth century and has been one of Manchester's principal commercial streets ever since. The Cross Street Chapel, one of the oldest Unitarian congregations in England, has been here since 1694. The original Town Hall, built 1822-25 at the junction with King Street, stood here before Waterhouse's building in Albert Square replaced it. The pub claims to be the nearest licensed premises to the datum point on St Ann's Church tower from which distances to Manchester were measured. Whether that is precisely true is hard to verify, but it speaks to how central this corner has always been.
The modern revival began in the 1990s under Steve Pilling, and Tom's is now part of Roger Ward's Victorian Chop House Company alongside Sam's and the Albert Square Chop House. The building is Grade II listed, and CAMRA includes it on their National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors, one of only a handful of Manchester pubs to hold that recognition. The terracotta and Accrington brick exterior is easy to walk past if you are not looking for it, wedged between larger buildings on a busy street. But the interior is unmistakable. The green arches, the diamond floor, the narrow depth of the place, the sense that you are eating in a tunnel built by Edwardians who took tiling as seriously as engineering. The Studds built it, both Sarahs kept it going, Robert Walker gave it the building it deserved, and Manchester has been eating in it ever since.