Category Archives: london

The Original Irish Theme Pubs?

Guinness.

For now, the only biographical information we have about Patrick Fitzpatrick, founder of Godson’s, London, c.1977, is in some old cuttings Ian Mackey kindly shared. One article, from 1978, says that Fitzpatrick, at 23, was ‘one of the third generation of the Murphy family who have run a string of pubs in East London for 50 years’. We knew we’d seen the name Murphy in connection with London pubs and dug through the old paperbacks until we found this is from The Evening Standard Guide to London Pubs by Martin Green and Tony White (1973):

Since the demolition of the Duke of Cambridge on the opposite corner, the White Hart is the only remaining old-style Murphy’s in the East End, apart from the tiny Manchester Arms in Hackney Road. (The Old Red Lion, Whitechapel Road, and the Mackworth Arms, Commercial Road, have both been dragged struggling into the Seventies.) Murphy’s is not, as some people think, a brewery, but a firm which was originated in 1934 by a Mr J.R. Murphy from Co. Offaly who pioneered draught Guinness in the East End of London… Murphy’s, Mile End, remains an honest-to-goodness East End pub… where you can hear Irish music and choose from a wide range of draught beers, including… what is probably the best kept pint of draught Guinness in the East End.

That bit about ‘old-style Murphy’s’ suggests they were quite an institution. That’s supported by the fact that modern pub review websites also say that the White Hart is ‘known locally’ by that name. And yet there is surprisingly little (easily accessible…) information about the pubs or J.R. Murphy & Sons. Company listings suggest that the White Hart was the group headquarters, at any rate, and that it was formally dissolved in 2010.

What we’re especially interested in is whether the ‘fifteen or so’ pubs the Murphys owned constituted the original Irish theme chain — or was it a chain of pubs that just happened to be founded by an Irishman? We’d need to see photos or read descriptions of the interiors to get a sense of how much set dressing there was, but the Guinness and Irish music mentioned are clues. If these pubs were self-consciously Irish, to what extent did they provide a template for the chains that followed in the eighties and nineties?

Do you remember Murphy’s pubs? Or know Patrick Fitzpatrick? If so, let us know below.

One Pub to Tell the Story


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We’ve been considering, for the purposes of this here book we’re working on, whether there’s a single pub in which the whole story of British beer since 1963 is encapsulated. We haven’t hit on one yet, but we’ve found a couple of interesting candidates. Consider, for example, the Nag’s Head in Hampstead, which tells at least part of the story.

Though some sources say there was a pub here from 1698, the present building seems to have appeared in the early nineteenth century (further research could pin this down), and it was not especially genteel at that time.

MARYLEBONE.– Highway Robbery.– Henry Cannon, John Surety, and Thomas Willoughby, three labouring-looking men, were yesterday placed at the bar before the sitting Magistrate… charged with assaulting on the King’s highway a middle-aged woman, named Mary Keal, and taking from her person a shawl and seven shilling in silver… Inspectoer Aggs, of the S division, said that from information he received he went on Wednesday evening, accompanied by one of his men, to the Nag’s Head [on Heath Street]. On entering the taproom he saw the two first Prisoners, who were sitting down. He said to Cannon, “I want you;” and then turning to Shurety said, “I want you also.” Cannon said, “Very well,” and they both got up and finished what they were drinking and left the house with him and the constable. (Morning Post, 22 November 1833)

More than a century later, however, the pub’s name had changed: it had become The Cruel Sea, after Nicholas Monsarrat’s 1951 novel about the Battle of the Atlantic during World War II, and was the quintessential ‘theme pub’, popular with actors. Our guess is that the name change came with the renovation in 1958, but we could be wrong. Here’s what our old chums Martin Green and Tony White had to say in 1968:

…the pub contains nautical gear and prints of whaling ships and the sea, as well as murals by Robert Lenkiewicz. Placed bang in the middle of Hampstead,  it does a brisk trade, though it is seldom too crowded for comfort, like many other pubs near-by. It serves wine by the glass, or by the bottle… as well as draught Guinness and Worthington… The clientele is predominantly young, second-generation Hampstead, whose parents moved here when it was beginning to be fashionable without being too expensive… (Guide to London Pubs, 1968 edn.)

We hadn’t realised that the Cruel Sea, well-known in its day, was the same pub as the Nag’s Head, until Christopher Hutt told us so. As head of CAMRA Real Ale Investments (CAMRAIL), their pub-owning spin-off, in the mid-seventies, one of the first things he did on acquiring this property in 1975 was ditch the theme and revert back to the old-fashioned, properly ‘pubby’ moniker. It was the cause of some anxiety for CAMRA — why were they opening a pub here in competition with several other existing ‘real ale pubs’ rather than in, say, Norwich, which had hardly any decent boozers? And it was frightfully middle class, not to mention expensive. At any rate, it was a runaway success during the years of the ‘real ale craze’.

Between CAMRAIL (which fizzled out in the eighties) and today, the Nag’s Head ceased to be a pub. It is now an estate agent’s office. Which, we suppose, does tell a story of the British pub, albeit one with a rather downbeat ending.

Back to the Future

Pub: the Hole in the Wall, Waterloo, London.

By Bailey

Last week, I interviewed Terry Pattinson, who, while not a founder member of CAMRA, joined in October the summer of 1972, and was elected to the National Executive in 1973 October the same year.

I’m never sure whether veterans from the world of beer and brewing will want to meet in a pub — what if they’re recovering alcoholics or just bored of beer? — but Terry wanted to meet at Waterloo, so I suggested the Hole in the Wall.

When we asked last year which were the first specialist real ale pubs, several people named it as an early example, and so I was keen to check it out. Semi-coincidentally, Terry was able to tell me how it got its cult reputation:

This place used to be a shit hole, with one small bar in the front room. This whole back room was my doing. The landlord then was Irish and had one leg and a stick. I told him about CAMRA and said, go on, get one hand-pump in – get Young’s Special in and see how it goes. When I came in a while later, he wouldn’t let me pay for my pint: the place was packed, he’d done very well out of it, and it became a sort of real ale destination.

Terry Pattinson, c.1975.

Terry on the cover of CAMRA’s What’s Brewing, March 1975.

Terry, who still has a Gateshead accent, worked as a journalist from the nineteen-sixties until his retirement a few years ago, and is best known for his investigation into Arthur Scargill’s financial affairs in the early nineties. Once we’d finished talking about CAMRA, the conversation wandered on to Fleet Street’s drinking culture in the nineteen-seventies. ‘I was probably drinking…’ He paused to think. ‘Seventy pints a week? Eighty?’ A quick count followed, with fingers held up: ‘Four at lunch, then back to my desk. Another four after work, that’s eight. Then down here to get my train, and I’ve have another while I waiting. Then another, or maybe two, while I waited for my wife to pick me up at the other end.’

For a moment, I felt both transported in time, and slightly inadequate as I played at journo with my notebook and ‘shorthand’ (terrible handwriting).

These days, the beer at the Hole in the Wall is hit and miss, and I wondered whether my pint of Young’s Special, sour and buttery, was perhaps the dregs of the original c.1975 cask. Still, it’s always nice to find a pub with a place in Britain’s beer history that remains standing, and remains a pub.

Boak couldn’t join me on this trip to London, which means I get to elbow her out and put my byline on all the posts I write off the back of it. See — I’m getting the hang of this Fleet Street stuff!

Community pubs defined too narrowly?

A recent advertisement from Meantime Brewing.

A recent advertisement from Meantime Brewing.

By Bailey

Jerry: What community? There’s a community?

Elaine: Of course there’s a community.

Jerry: All these years I’m living in a community, I had no idea.

‘We were so pleased when an Antic pub opened round the corner from our house,’ said a couple of our non-beer-geek (‘normal’) friends in London last week, slightly startling me. ‘It was such a relief.’

It turns out that the lively but more traditional pub near their house had never been their cup of tea — its full of posters for a political party they definitely don’t support, and they got too much faintly threatening attention from the the regulars. Sure, it was a community local, but the community in question didn’t want them. At the Antic, on the other hand…

On entering, they bumped into someone they knew, and there was some hugging and air-kissing. Ten minutes later, they realised that their neighbours were sat nearby, and exchanged notes on the preceding Monday morning’s hangovers. Then the chap from across the road wandered by and they gossiped for ten minutes about some matters of local concern. The twenty-something barman greeted them like old friends, too. There was, in short, more chit-chat and chumminess than we’ve seen in a lot of supposedly friendly village pubs.

Just because this particular community happens to be made up of middle-class professionals, some of them gay, most of them from places other than London, doesn’t make it any less ‘authentic’, and Antic seem to have found a gap in the market: they need somewhere to congregate. Our friends seem to know the location of most of the Antic pubs in South London and see them as safe ports of call. (A chain with a reliable if predictable offer… Is it too much to call Antic ‘the middle class Wetherspoons’?)

It’s easy to take the piss out of the olives and Macbooks, the expensive Scotch eggs and silly hats, but that’s all superficial inverse snobbery: the important thing is that people are in a pub they like, buying beer, and having a bloody good time.

The beer? Well, one of our mates was drinking kegged Meantime Pale Ale — his favourite, he said, it reminded him of IPAs he’d enjoyed on a particularly enjoyable holiday in the US last year. Make of that what you will.

Progress Vs. the Pub

St Martin's Lane pub c. 1973

By Grepnold, via Flickr.

In researching Becky’s Dive Bar, we came across mention of another pub, Ye Olde Mitre on St Martin’s Lane, which had a reputation for selling a wide range of beer in the nineteen-fifties. (Note: not the one off Hatton Garden.) Though we’ve had no luck finding out more about the Mitre, we have, as a pleasant side-effect, found a new question to ponder on: when did people start fighting to preserve pubs?

On 6 November 1968, the Covent Garden authority, a government body which had taken on ownership of the historic fruit and vegetable market and surrounding land, announced its grand redevelopment plan. It was to include widespread demolition, and the building of motorways and concrete walkways, turning a ramshackle ‘neighbourhood’ into something from Logan’s Run. (But probably a bit crapper.)

There was a very successful campaign to overturn the scheme, led by local residents, and supported by architects, historians and others with an interest in heritage and preservation. What is especially interesting to us, however, is the importance placed on the area’s pubs.

The Architecture Review published several pieces arguing for the preservation not of specific buildings, but of the area as a whole, because Covent Garden’s ‘unique qualities… depend on groups of buildings… [and] historic street patterns’ (22 November 1972). Dan Cruickshank and Colin Amery, in that same piece, provided a watch-list of vulnerable, unprotected properties in Covent Garden, which included many public houses, such as the Nell Gwyn and The Lamb and Flag.

By 1973, preserving the area’s pubs had become a campaign in its own right, which the The Observer described in a piece on 11 February, illustrated with a gallery of pub fronts:

The regular patrons had been preparing for a war of passive resistance — ‘Gandhi with an elbow bent’ as one put it — for the pubs are all within the Covent Garden Development Area and were in danger of being ‘developed’ out of existence.

But the pubs have been saved from the wreckers by Mr Geoffrey Rippon, Minister for the Environment — they have been listed as being of special architectural or historical interest. Not one can be touched now… Londoners and visitors alike will thus be able to go on drinking in the Lamb and Flag, built over the narrowest thoroughfare in London, The Crown Tavern where the idea for ‘Punch’ was thought up, and The Sun, whose forerunner on the site was one of Ben Jonson’s locals.

(Note, once again, the tittering amusement with which journalists write about beer and pubs.)

Pete Brown argues in his Shakespeare’s Local that people began to feel nostalgic about disappearing pubs after World War I, and tells the story of how the George Inn, Southwark, was ‘saved for the nation’ by the National Trust in 1937. It seems to us, though, that it was in the sixties and seventies — when everything got its own banner-wielding march and/or campaign group — that a more general urge to ‘save’ pubs (even those without literary or historic associations, or any particular architectural merit) emerged.

What we need to do next is read up on other post-war development schemes and see how prominently pubs featured in any campaigns against them.

Should pubs be preserved? There are lots, and perhaps not every single one should be considered sacred, but there’s certainly no reason why they should be treated with less respect than any other type of building.

UPDATE: this BBC article on historic disregard for ‘heritage’ seems relevant.

The Earl of Essex, Islington

Beer board at the Earl of Essex pub.

It feels like something has changed when a non-beer-geek friend suggests we meet at a convenient pub near his house and it just turns out to be the latest hip ‘craft beer’ joint — the Earl of Essex, Islington.

The thing that immediately caught our eye was the beer list — a wooden display which appeared to have been a church hymn board at some point in its life, and which provided key information on all the draught beers on offer, in bloody great big black letters. Beats a sheet of A4 Blu-Tacked to a post by the bar any day.

Being with a gang of ‘normals’, however, we became very aware of a key omission: “Are any of these beers dark?” they asked. “Which ones are pale?” A lot of people still choose their beer based on its colour and, as Barry Norman would say, why not? Until people starting messing about with mindbending ideas like black IPA, it was a decent indicator of how a beer might taste.

Along with some very decent cask ale, we also got to drink a couple of American IPAs from cans — not something we’ve done before. They were no worse, as far as we could tell, than kegs or bottles, and, though we weren’t taking notes, we took a distinct liking to Ska Brewing’s Modus Hoperandi.

Then, in a small world moment, the table next to us filled up with beer bloggers we recognised from their Twitter avatars. You might choose to take their presence as a mark of quality or, depending on your point of view, as a danger sign. (Being with friends from real life who we haven’t seen for months, it didn’t seem quite the right time to say hello, so, rather pathetically, we ‘lurked’.)

This is sure to become a staple on the beer geek circuit in London and means that Islington alone can now support a very decent crawl.

Ask not for whom the Bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

The Bell Pub, Walthamstow, East London.

By Boak

Of all the exciting beer developments in London since we’ve moved away, none have intrigued us as much as the sudden discovery of demand for good beer in our former home of Walthamstow. This article highlighted the fact that not one, not two, but three (THREE!) formerly rough pubs were due to re-open under new management.

We went back to Walthamstow last week to have a look at the developments. Both the Chequers and the Cock are still being refurbished, which left us with the Bell.

The Bell is one of those large pubs-on-a-junction that you get in Victorian suburbs of London, the product of rapid expansion in housing plus limits on where licenced premises could be built. I went in once or twice as a teenager and remember it being huge and mostly empty. The best thing I could say about it then was that it wasn’t as rough as it looked.

Like other pubs of its ilk, it passed through many managers and a few halfhearted refurbishments in an attempt to bring it back to life, but never managed to shake its rough reputation. The Beer In The Evening comments make for a fascinating mini-history of the last ten years.

Why have the Bell’s new owners (apparently) succeeded where others have failed? Firstly, an ambitious but very tasteful refurbishment, which has involved stripping out lots of twentieth century additions and emphasising the original features (and complementing what’s there with old furniture). The pictures on the website actually make the pub look more modern than it feels. We commented a lot on how impressive the refurbishment was, how much more ‘pubby’ it felt now than we’d ever known it, and how, despite the vast space, it felt cosy.

Secondly, they are openly going for a more ‘aspirational’ market (craft beer and jazz feature heavily in the marketing) – but they are still managing to attract and welcome a range of clientele that reflect the local area.  Extremely welcoming and talkative bar staff help here.

Thirdly, the beer selection and quality is now the best in Walthamstow (which is getting harder and harder to do, and might be difficult to maintain if Antic open the Chequers as planned)  There are eight hand-pumps (plus a mixture of keggy stuff). We had to be somewhere else that afternoon, so we were limited as to what we could try in the time available. We were delighted with Brodie’s London Fields, which we could have easily drunk all afternoon. We also sampled their Landlord, which we’re coming to think is a good test of whether a pub can look after its ale or not.  They passed with flying colours.

We don’t want to exaggerate the quality of the beer selection –  the enormous competition in London means there’s probably not much to drag the serious beer geek out of their way to get here. However, if we were still living in Walthamstow, it would be our new local, no question.

Picture to come when Bailey gets back.

A London pub menagerie

The Prospect of Whitby - Mid 1960's

From Colin Pickett on Flickr.

The great thing about researching a book is what you find by accident. Take this passage from a 16 May 1959 article in The Times, for example:

Towards the end of the Lower Pool, The Prospect of Whitby is the most aggressively picturesque of London River taverns, with a veranda as a platform for the yarns of one-time smuggled cargoes. Wistful little Jenny, the monkey, has long since gone–

Whoah, hold on — a monkey? A wistful one? In a pub? A little more digging turned up this:

A visit to the “Prospect of Whitby” on the Thames-side at Wapping has long been an important item in the education of visitors to London who are lucky enough to have knowing guides. From 1939 it was run by James Saunders — “Slim Jim” — and his wife… Mrs Saunders, who even in the most difficult days of the blitz produced meals for 200 a day, had a specially soft spot in her heart for animals and birds. The population of the “Prospect” included in her day, three parrots, a monkey, four cats and three dogs. (The Guardian, 19 May 1947.)

(Here’s Mrs Saunders (or Sanders) in the Hulton Getty picture library.)

The author of the Times article, L.M. Bates, seems to have been a bit obsessed with Jenny the monkey, and she later cropped up in a 1980 book he wrote about the Thames, though, this time, he mentioned that she ‘rattled her chain along the rail’ — a grim detail, which reminds us that the idea of keeping exotic animals in pubs might not be quite as much fun as it sounds.

See also: donkeys in pubs.

Rocking the Back Room at the Pub

Ringo Starr's Sentimental Journey album.

“We’re about as psychedelic as a pint o’ beer wi’ the lads.” Alan Clark of The Hollies, 1967

The pub can’t claim to be the natural home of British rock and roll — that honour probably goes to the Soho coffee shops where skiffle first found a home in the mid-nineteen-fifties. In the wake of Lonnie Donegan, however, every spotty, posing schoolboy in Britain joined a band, and there weren’t enough cafes to contain them. It didn’t take long for pubs to take up the slack. There had long been music in pubs, ranging from the singalong round the Joanna to very-nearly-full-blown music hall shows, but, from this period onward, some publicans began to see live, amplified music as a possible saviour.

Louder music is required in public-houses to attract people away from television sets, a London licensee told the London County Council Public Control Committee yesterday. His application for a waiver of the special condition attached to his licence, forbidding amplification of music, was granted. The applicant, Mr Harry Sternshine, licensee of a public-house in the East End, said that a skiffle group in a neighbouring house was attracting his customers. (Guardian, 14 March 1957.)

Pubs with ‘back rooms’ (usually gloomy, damp and smelling of stale beer, in our experience) also became rehearsal spaces, in exchange for a small payment or the promise to ‘buy a few drinks’ afterwards. (The Rolling Stones, for example, rehearsed at the now defunct Bricklayers Arms on Duck Lane, Soho.) Those back, upstairs or downstairs rooms also offered temporary ‘clubs’ a home, as was the case with the Princess Louise in Holborn, whose upper rooms hosted some of the coolest skiffle and folk clubs from around 1957.

In their Guide to London Pubs (1968), Martin Green and Tony White offer a summary of the ups and downs of pop music in London pubs from the mid-fifties. Of the early sixties, they say:

Musical pubs became the glory of London pub life. Anywhere you went round London on a weekend evening, you were sure to hear the deafening twang and throb of a hundred guitars with percussion and amplifier… A new young audience of under twenty-fives was created and with a new pub vocabulary. If you went into one of the new musical pubs, you heard talk of others: ‘Heard that new lead guitar down at the Oak?’ or ‘Who’s on the drums now at the Crown?’

Man playin guitar in pub.We are fortunate that this period was captured on film in the 1964 documentary Portrait of Queenie, which includes much footage of bands and singers performing at the Ironbridge Tavern in Poplar, East London. It’s not a concert venue — people are talking and drinking at tables — but nor is it exactly ‘pubby’. A cabaret, perhaps? (At the other end of the cavernous room, an elderly cockney tries to drown out the bands by bashing away at the Old Pianner.)

As skiffle gave way to harder-edged R&B, some pubs gained double identities: decrepit Victorian piles by day but better known, to the hipsters who came out at night, by faux-American names.

I went to the end of the District Line and found a place in the back of a pub called the Station Hotel, in Richmond. I started a blues club there on Sunday nights, the worst night o the week. That’s how the Crawdaddy Club started. The Rolling Stones used to do their own version of a Bo Diddley tune called ‘Let’s Do the Crawdaddy’. When Long John [Baldry] asked, ‘What do you call your place?’ I replied that I didn’t have a name for it. It just came out ‘Crawdaddy’, and from then on we were the Crawdaddy Club. (Giorgio Gomelsky in It Ain’t Easy, Paul Myers, 2007.)

The Crawdaddy was just one of a circuit of such venues around London. The blues and R&B bands that played in them spawned rock groups like The Who, The Yardbirds, The Small Faces and The Kinks, and musicians like Baldry and Rod Stewart. It was at the Railway Hotel, Wealdstone, Middlesex, in 1964, that Pete Townshend of The Who first accidentally smashed his guitar.

Detail from a The Who poster.

With Beatlemania and the ‘beat boom’, Green and White record a slight decline after 1965, though pubs continued to offer a proving ground for young rock musicians, along with church halls, on their way to new, specialist venues, or package tours of cinemas and ‘winter gardens’ around the country. At the same time, more and more pubs turned into (crap) ‘discotheques’, losing their essential ‘pubness’ along the way. In The Beverage Report (1970), Derek Cooper wrote disparagingly of this trend:

Symptomatic of the growing move towards food and music in what was formerly a pub outlet are the Courage Barclay and Simonds discodine centres. On Saturday night at their Kew pub 500 customers throng to see a disc jockey, meet go-go girls and eat chicken and chips at 10s 9d a portion.

With the nineteen-seventies, though, the pub came back into focus, at least in superficial terms. All those ‘veteran’ rock groups, their members nearing  or having hit 30, often divorced and coming down from a decade of partying, began to look back wistfully towards their early years and a simpler life. The Who’s 1971 ‘best of’, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, featured a sepia-toned portrait of The Railway Hotel, and The Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies, released the same year, used photographs of the Archway Tavern in North London. In his biography of The Who’s Keith Moon, Dear Boy, Tony Fletcher tells the story of the drummer’s chauffeur-driven visit, in the aftermath of a disappointing stadium gig, to the Hole in the Wall in Waterloo, then a rough cider drinkers’ hangout, where he felt quite at home. It is perhaps Beatle Ringo Starr who sums up this instinct best with the title of his 1970 album, which also features a portrait of a Victorian pub on the sleeve: Sentimental Journey.

As the decade wore on, and rock struggled to reconcile its ‘down home’ roots with the excess of stadium tours, concept albums and ‘glam’, the pub really had its hour, giving its name to an entire genre: pub rock. A musically diverse ‘movement’, the only thing many of the bands involved had in common was what they were reacting against, and the venues where they played. Crumbling, smelly Victorian pubs were the natural home for denim and leather clad guitar bands playing blues, R&B, country rock and ‘power pop’, and their fans. The venues, such as The Hope and Anchor in Islington, were more famous than many of the bands.

Once again, though, even vast Victorian gin palaces weren’t big enough: bands that ‘made it’, like Elvis Costello or Dr Feelgood, moved on to bigger venues. At the same time, ‘pub rock’ mutated into punk — a much more easily packaged scene, fueled by speed rather than beer, which didn’t quite belong in the blokey atmosphere of the boozer, but rather the basement club, student union or municipal hall.

The story arguably came full circle when crack London session rock musicians Chas Hodges and Dave Peacock formed a duo, Chas & Dave, in the mid-seventies, and invented a sound they called ‘rockney’. It had elements of boogie woogie and R&B, but also featured melodies and lyrics, performed in strong London accents, which harked back to pub piano singalongs of the pre-skiffle era.

When the barman won’t serve him anymore.
Gertcha, cowson, gertcha.
Bar stool preaching –
He’s always been the same.

They had breakthrough success when, fittingly, when several of their songs were used in a series of nostalgic black and white adverts for Courage Best. When Chas & Dave appeared on TV, it was often in the setting of a pub.

In the years that followed, pubs and rock music continued to collide — the Camden Crawl, one of the coolest annual events in the Britpop era, began with ‘a couple of pubs’, for example — but it was also during this time that ‘pub rock’ and its cousin ‘dad rock’ became insults, implying a certain plodding conservatism.

These days, it seems to us that, as an idea of ‘the perfect pub’ has solidified, rock music and the pub as concepts have been more-or-less entirely decoupled. Pubs still have music, and musicians still like pubs, but they don’t need each other as once they did.

Beer Books: Shakespeare’s Local

The George Inn, Southwark.

Illustration from Walks In London Vol. 1, c.1896.

Talking to publishers about beer books, you quickly learnt that there’s one writer they think has really nailed it in commercial terms: Pete Brown. They like his ‘high concept’, ‘pitchable’ approach; they like his titles; and most of all, they love the fact that his books appeal to ‘normals’ as much as they do to beer geeks.

Shakespeare’s Local is yet another step towards the mainstreaming of both Brown and beer, though, in fact, beer is hardly mentioned at all and even the pub of the title isn’t always centre-stage so much as it’s used as a lens through which to view London at various periods in its history.

It tells the story of the George Inn, Southwark — these days a tourist attraction, tourist trap, after work City hangout and chain pub, but long associated with Olde London, Shakespeare and Dickens.

The opening is reminiscent of — bear with us — a ‘history episode’ of Hartnell-era Doctor Who; a Powell and Pressburger film; one of those nostalgic shorts from Roll Out the Barrel; and a nineteen-eighties text adventure we really want to play: “April the nineteenth in the Year of Our Lord 1737… You quickly scan the front page news of shipping list on its way to the colonies and elsewhere…”

> TAKE TANKARD
> DRINK BEER
> GO EAST

The portrayal of the relationship between Southwark and the City of London is excellent and, throughout, there’s a sense of virtual reality — of being there, in the time and place described with carefully chosen details in 3D, surround-sound, smell-o-vision. We came away with a list of places to visit, things to see and things to look out for.

It made us laugh out loud here and there, too — a quality not to be undervalued.

It’s not perfect. With our mortarboards and scholarly gowns on, we regret the lack of footnotes, and wouldn’t cite it as a source in a Phd paper; but, on the other hand, in holiday reading mode, we found a few passages where Brown has, in publishing parlance, ‘been too generous to his research’, and so caught ourselves skimming. (Yes, that’s right — he can’t win.)

On the whole, though, it is a great read and (with a few shopping days to go…) the perfect gift for anyone in your family with a passing interest in London, history, pubs, architecture, the heritage industry, highwaymen, public transport or lewd poetry.

The single pub micro-history could become an interesting sub-genre: here’s a nice piece on a pub in Croydon by Kake.