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Welcome to Denry's Retaurant and Angels Bar! | The Denrys Experience
Our regular guests will already know that there are in fact three restaurants at Denry's plus the recently reburbished Angel Bar.
The Edwardian Cellar Restaurant and the Victorian Ground Floor Restaurant. This gives you the chance to dine in Edwardian Elegance or Victorian Splendour to make your dining experience a night to remember. The third room is of a Georgian theme and caters for weddings, functions, corporate events or training days.
The Angels Bar provides a place for your to enjoy a pre dinner drink with leather seating and a fully equipped bar. Angels Bar is located next door to the Denrys Restaurant with connecting doors.
Literary Connections
THE CARD IS DENRY MACHIN!
St Johns Square, burslem, has been the location of many scene in the novels of Potteries born Edwardian English author, Arnold Bennett (1867-1931). Burslem is Bennetts Bursley. His locations and his characters are a composite of reality. Thus St johns Square becomes St Lukes Sqaure ~ its as simple as that!.
Here, at the bottom of the eastern corner, is Baines Drapers shop of the Old Wives Tale. In life it is where Bennetts drandparents raised his mother; where he spent much of his boyhood, mentally noting Burslems geography and its people, until the time came when he made fact become fiction in the Five Towns novels. Even today, Burslem remains much as Bennett knew it. Locations that provide pictorial evidence for visitors and yet still capture the atmospherwe of long ago Victorian times.
In the Squares western corner is a shop set in The Card, where Bennett created the interiors of the dance shcool of Miss Ruth Earp, the predatory schemer who initiated Denry Machin into the world of sesibility only to reject him after she had spent all his money.
The dining rooms you sit in at Denrys, were once used as temporary offices by John Keates, the publisher of the highly appraised Keates Directories and almanacs, and the younger brother of J E Keates the well known Temperance Alliance leader, whose own drapers shop was situated next door below. A brother in law was Lewis George Hales, a partner in the drapery business and father H K Hales MP, immortalised by bennett as the the actual person on whom The Card is based.
Denry Machin, whose first name was shortened by his mother from Edward Henry, an expedient device for calling a boy to his chores, rose from humble roots to makeand lose a fortune, to accrue another and to become the youngest and most popular mayor Bursley had ever cherished. This is the well known them of one of Arnold Bennetts most enjoyable novels. A film of the book, starring Alec Guiness as the card was released in 1952. It is atribute to the author, known for his provincial grimness, that The Card is still remembered for its enduring achievement by "...making us all laugh!"
(Historical notes by Fred Hughes)
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