THE landlord of an East Lancashire pub was toasting the good news that they have been announced as Lancashire Telegraph Pub of the Year as voted by you, our readers.

Declan McKavett, from The Coal Yard in Coal Street, Burnley, celebrated with staff after we revealed they topped the poll.

Each week, the Lancashire Telegraph shine the spotlight on the industry featuring venues in East Lancashire and surrounding areas in our Pub of the Week feature.

We drew up a shortlist of all pubs we featured last year and asked our readers to help create a top six of the best.

After speaking to each of them, our readers got the chance to post votes for their favourite.

We were amazed by the response from our readers with more than 400 different postal votes submitted to us - each counting 10 votes to the individual pubs’ total.

The Coal Yard came out top of the pile with nearly 196 postal votes, but special praise should also go to the Brown Cow in Blackburn with 100 postal ones.

Declan said: “It feels great to be winning the Pub of the Year.

“It is really nice and shows so many customers voted for us and we are trying to improve the pub and get people in the town with things like Burnley Live festival recently.

“We are catering for people of all ages with sports in the booths and then our quiz on the phones.

“We want to give people the best possible experience when they come into the venue.

“We have changed Saturday for karaoke as there are no other places in the town centre offering it and there are lots of customers have been grateful for us to do it.

“We are always looking to change and improve and the Burnley Live event made our customers request live music and we are just working our way around trying to do it.

“We are happy about winning the Pub of the Year but it would not be possible without our staff as they are wonderful as they make the customers feel like family and try to build up a bond with them.”