The Yates' I recall certainly didn't have nice tiles and thick carpet on the floor! You must have gone to a very posh one
I went to one near Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester (late 70s to early 80s) once and never went in it again either! But we've been a couple of times to the one on the seafront in Blackpool when we came over for our "winter weeks" since 2013.
This bar is one of the Hogarth's chain of Gin palaces and from what I've seen of their website, the layout of the bar seems to be the same in them all. They only reach as far south as Swansea at the moment.
The only drawback as far as I'm concerned is the fact they have Sky TV (Sport) everywhere you look but on the day we visited, the volume wasn't up on any of the channels.
We always seem to meet some unusual people when we go out and about - maybe we have that look about us

On this day, we met the owners of a "knitting hotel" which is situated up past the north pier and beyond the Imperial Hotel just off the seafront. Apparently, there is no signage outside to indicate it's a hotel, it gets along on reputation only and is always full....
I haven't got around to looking it up yet - so that was my reminder to myself to do it!
Edit: I just searched on the internet and found an article where it was covered by the BBC last October:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-la ... e-37636065