On Saturday January 24, Duncan Ferguson walked into the Winslow Hotel pub on Goodison Road and handed licensee Dave Bond £1,000 to put behind the bar. Ferguson, the former Everton centre-forward, was there because the Winslow, 140 years old and standing in the shadow of Goodison Park’s towering Main Stand, was closing. Eight months after Everton’s men left Goodison, this was another farewell party and Ferguson had turned up to say goodbye. “It was a brilliant gesture,” said Bond.
Ferguson was not the only ex-Evertonian present. Former captain Alan Stubbs, 1995 FA Cup winners Graham Stuart and Joe Parkinson, and 1987 League champion Ian Snodin each had a turn on the mic. Kevin Sheedy, one of the heroes of Howard Kendall’s great mid-1980s team, made an appearance too.
The Winslow, established in 1886, has a history intertwined with that of the club that set up home next door six years later. In his days living on Goodison Avenue, the great Dixie Dean was a regular drinker there. Norman Greenhalgh, a member of the 1939 championship-winning team, became landlord in the 1950s.
After the long-serving but luckless Mike Lyons won his first Merseyside derby at the 21st attempt, in a 1981 FA Cup fourth-round tie, he led the entire team over the road to celebrate. Joe Royle popped in for a pint after his first match as manager, in November 1994, yielded another derby triumph. Brian Labone, captain of the 1970 League title winners, collapsed and died on his way home from a supporters’ function there in 2006.
The list goes on. The Winslow was home to the supporters’ club for a period and after the club received a Premier League points deduction in November 2023, it was there that fans held an open meeting to plan their protests. When broadcaster TNT interviewed manager David Moyes in the pub before last April’s televised home fixture against Arsenal, Moyes commented that his father used to be a regular during his first spell in charge.
This was a place with several generations’ worth of memories. Inside the Howard Kendall Bar was a flag bearing the name of the late Kevin Campbell, which hung above the favourite seat of the former Everton and Arsenal striker. After Bond, an Irishman and lifelong Evertonian, had taken over the running of the Winslow on its reopening in 2014, following a brief closure, it gained the appearance of an Everton shrine, its walls adorned with photos and artwork by Thomas Regan, a member of the Everton Heritage Society. Flags and scarves festooned the bar.
Bond’s own memories of the place include the moment of Abdoulaye Doucouré’s goal against Bournemouth that saved Everton from relegation in 2023. He was in the office upstairs when the wave of noise from the stadium hit the pub. Because of the brief time lag, he could run downstairs and watch the goal “live” on TV with the drinkers at the bar. He recalls too the long queue that had already formed outside the pub an hour before he began serving at 9am on the day of Goodison’s final Premier League game against Southampton last May. In an interview with ITV’s Granada Reports news programme, Bond reflected: “Once we lost the Everton fans to the degree that we did, the soul left this building.”
He had tried to find a way to sustain the business. For the first handful of games at Everton’s new home two miles away, he laid on a return coach service (“a 90-seater”) to the stadium with entertainment in the pub afterwards. With interest limited to around 25 supporters, Bond “couldn’t keep it going because we weren’t making any money”.
And though Everton’s women have eight WSL fixtures at Goodison this season, Bond estimated that customers for a women’s fixture brought in no more than 5% of the profit a men’s match would. Where he might have sold 3,000 pints in a day, now “they’re coming in, families with kids, and having one or two drinks and that’s it”. Other pubs have struggled too. “I think eventually a lot of businesses will go under,” added Bond. “The pubs predominantly are suffering because, let’s face it, it’s 40,000 people on a matchday … we were so dependent on that.”
While Bond has a new challenge running an Everton-themed bar close to the new ground, Dixie’s on Dickson Street, the Winslow today stands empty. Over the road, the awning on the exterior of the Main Stand carries the slogan “A new era”. But not for everybody.
