The White Bear Hotel    The White Bear Hotel appears on
the 1849 map of Manchester, as you can see below. It sat adjacent
to the Mosley Hotel and across Piccadilly from the Infirmary and
Lunatic Asylum. If you look at the drawing above, it is quite
apparent that it was created from two houses. The
windows on the left-hand side of the building were clearly at a
different level from the ones on the right and there were two distinct
doorways.
 I don't know when the hotel was
built but it seems that it occupied a site where Sir Ashton Lever had
previously had a house. An illustration of the house, that you
can see by following the link below, is dated 1783 so the White Bear
was built after that. Lever once owned the land between Ancoats
Lane and the Daube Holes near the street that we now know as
Piccadilly, which
was then called Lever Row. The map below, dated 1751, illustrates
a very rural Manchester "town" centre.
 The "Daube Holes" were
pits from which clay had been excavated to make wattle & daub
houses. The pits flooded to create a pond that was later transformed
into
a small lake in front of the Infirmary.
  The extract from the Adshead Map above is shown with the permission of Chetham's Library Sir Ashton Lever and his wife occupied the house that you can see by clicking on the link below, and it eventually gave way for the construction of the houses that became the White Bear Hotel Ashton Lever's House circa 1783 The White Bear is indicated by a
red arrow in the drawing below.
 The White Bear is still on the
site in 1889 according to a map of that date but by the time the
photograph below was taken the hotel was gone and replaced by a rather
oriental structure with an onion shaped dome.
 This was the Kardoma Cafe that
according to Pevsner was built in 1910 to a design by W. A. Thomas
& C. Heathcote. Whether this was a completely new building or
a reconstruction is unclear but the new building, although very
different in style, retained the same lower height in relation to the
buildings on either side. The Kardoma Cafe later became the
Lyon's Popular State Cafe.
 Below you can see the site
today. The White Bear Hotel - later the Kardoma Cafe - later the
Lyon's Cafe is now a branch of Superdrug.
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