The White Star is located on Rainford Gardens, close to the lively Mathew Street area in Liverpool.
The White Star pub has a hanging pub sign. The sign has a black frame, and a coloured picture of a ship from the White Star Line on the River Mersey passing the iconic Royal Liver Building. The name of the pub is written above the picture in white lettering.
It is a traditional two-roomed pub full of character. Its walls are adorned with memorabilia including, many pictures of White Star shipping liners. A wall in the back room of the pub is dedicated to photographs of the Beatles.
It is twinned with bars in both the Czech Republic and Norway. Live football matches are shown and the pub.
Guest beers are often from Bowland microbrewery in Lancashire.
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An article by Alistair Houghton in the Liverpool Echo in 2013 describes the White Star as follows;
"Beyond its red tiled frontage in Rainford Gardens is a feast of red leather, fancy tiling, elaborate wood carving and even some sturdy, majestic gold nymph-adorned radiators.
You can stand at the huge wooden semicircular bar, grab a red leather seat under the glass screens at the front, head to the quieter backroom or even pop to the tiny Beatles and Titanic mural-adorned beer garden.
Unsurprisingly, as a pub sharing the name of the Titanic’s owner White Star Line, there’s a fair bit of nautical memorabilia on show. But if you’re bored with your drinking companion there’s plenty else to divert your attention on the walls, which are festooned with old Liverpool imagery.
There is a Beatles connection, of course. Bob Wooler and Allan Williams used to pay their acts in the back room, and you can still sit where the Four Fabs used to pick up their beer money. But for Mathew Street – for Liverpool in fact – it’s a restrained tribute.
On the bar, you’ll always find a handfull of handpumps. There’s always Bass – one the most famous beers in the world but now a much rarer beast on draught – while on my latest visit I quaffed a refreshing White Star Ale from Bowland Brewery.
The first record of the White Star is an advert in an Empire Theatre programme from 1887 for the White Star carvery and bar.
The pub has changed a bit over those years. The carvery has long gone, for a start. And, the pub’s history says: “Where the telephone is, there used to be a dumb waiter. Where the gents is, was the back yard, and where the fruit machine now stands used to be the gents.”
In 1987 the pub underwent its most revolutionary change to date – it installed ladies’ toilets.
But it still feels like a time capsule from the Imperial age. In an area littered with fun pubs – how can there even be such a thing as a 90s theme bar? – it’s a true survivor of the golden age of the pub. An 1880s theme bar, if you will." SOURCE: (
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"Interestingly, there were no ladies toilets in the White Star until about 1987 because this was one of the few pubs left in the city that did not allow ladies in on their own due to the numbers of prostitutes that worked in the city from the end of the Second World War until, they say, the early 1990s." Source: (
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