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pubs real ale

The Talbot Arms, Settle

As you’ll see from the gallery we posted earlier today there’s no shortage of pubs in the conjoined-twin-towns of Settle and Giggleswick but one was our clear favourite: the Talbot Arms.

Situated off the High Street, behind the market place and a few doors down from the 17th-century architectural oddity that is the Folly, the Talbot is visually striking: a wall of white with the pub’s name in huge black letters and an unusual sign of a white dog which looks both hip and yet also strangely medieval.

Inside is a single large room, rather bare, which somehow conveys that dining is an option without making it feel like an obligation. On our multiple visits we found locals chatting at the bar, in corners gossiping, or in muddy boots reading the Craven Herald with glasses of wine.

The ale list at the Talbot.

The cask ale offer struck us as interesting for various reasons. First, because we recognised few of the breweries; secondly, because there was a clear effort to cover a range of styles, from mild to pale’n’hoppy via old-fashioned bitter; and, finally, because the range seemed more resolutely small-and-local than some other pubs in the area.

Pump clip for Partners Cascade.

Not every beer we tried was top notch but none of them were downright bad, and all were in good nick. It was also here that we also found our beer of the week: Partners Brewing Cascade (4% ABV, £3 a pint). Somewhat neglected in favour of more fashionable hop varieties, Cascade is surely due a revival — citrus, yes, but with a distinctive fruits-of-the-forest character that lent this particular beer a ripe juiciness to balance a light body and flinty bitterness.

Perhaps those of you who know the northern scene better than us will let us know whether Partners is a generally well-regarded brewery — we suspect not, or we might have heard of them — but, regardless, this particular beer was one we stuck on for multiple pints, and for two days in a row at that.

The Talbot Arms also has a proper beer garden — that is, not a wasp-infested yard next to the bins with a pile of mouldering carpet, as is found in most English pubs, but something landscaped and leafy, with solid tables, and a mixture of sunshine and shade. It isn’t quite up to German standards, but it’s not far off.

Now, if you visit Settle, the Talbot might not be your favourite — perhaps we were lucky with the weather and the particular beers that were on offer — but you can certainly have some fun finding out over the course of a day or weekend.

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photography pubs

GALLERY: Pubs of Settle & Giggleswick, N. Yorks

We’ve just spent a week in Giggleswick/Settle which, for its size, has plenty of decent pubs. Our favourite was the Talbot Arms, of which more later, but here’s a quick look at all the others.

The Golden Lion (far left) and Thirteen (right).
High Street, Settle, with the Golden Lion to the far left and Thirteen (with red CAMRA banner) to the right.
Doorway and signs at Thirteen.
Thirteen — almost a micropub, but not quite — advertises its offer. (Note: buy six pints, keep the receipts, and get a seventh free.)
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pubs

Notable Pubs #2: The Crooked House, Himley, Staffs

The Crooked House in Himley, just over the Staffordshire border near Dudley, is one of the weirdest pubs in Britain.

Reportedly built as a farmhouse, most accounts of its history assert that it became a public house in the 19th century, and was at first known as The Siden House. Siden, in the local dialect, meant ‘lopsided’ and it is an accurate description as one side of the pub is several feet lower than the other.

The leaning, now stabilised, is supposed to be a result of subsidence caused by coal-mining and has left doors, windows and signs entirely skew-whiff so that the building appears to be frozen in mid-collapse

The interior is no less strange with walls leaning backwards, the bar looming forward, and floors appearing to slope. At the same time, glasses slide across seemingly level surfaces, and marbles roll upward along shelves. It is a disorienting environment to drink in and, as one newspaper report put it, ‘he who negotiates it lurches from side to side like a landsman on board a ship in a storm’ (Dundee Evening Post, 16/09/1904).

A 1906 newspaper illustration of the Crooked House.
A 1906 newspaper illustration of the Crooked House showing brick buttresses.

Another report in the Daily Express (15/09/1904), suggested that it had only became a tourist attraction at around the turn of the 20th century, ‘a favourite place for a drive on Sundays’. (Perhaps over-egging, the same report describes the pub as ‘A Rival to the Tower of Pisa’.)

Its formal name was until recently the Glynne Arms, after Sir Stephen Glynne, 8th Baronet (1807-1874); though the inn stands on land owned by the Early of Dudley, Glynne owned and worked property thereabouts — some reports say he was engaged in mining, others that he operated an ironworks.

Postcard of the Crooked House c.1900.
Early 20th century postcard from the authors’ own collection.

These days, however, the pubs is officially called The Crooked House, and serves beer from Banks’s.

Main image derived from ‘Crooked House’ by Peter Broster, via Flickr, under a Creative Commons licence. The Crooked House is a staple of ‘Inns of Old England’ books but we feel justified in writing about it because we’d never registered it until last year, and so we guess others won’t know about it either.

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Beer history pubs

Proposed Public House

As ‘new towns’ and Corbusier-inspired estates were built in the rubble and green field of post-War Britain, pubs were a focus of debate.

At least that’s what preliminary research for one of several embryonic projects we have on the go suggests, though we’ve a lot more reading and pondering to do. In the meantime, here are a few nuggets we’ve stumbled across which start to hint at what else might be out there for us to find.

The argument seems to have been between, on the one hand, those who thought pubs were essential components of working class communities; and, on the other, those who saw pubs as part of slum culture, and so regarded this as an opportunity to sweep away a ‘social evil’ that was holding back progress.

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Beer history beer in fiction / tv pubs quotes

Pub Gentrification in Jude the Obscure,

“[The inn] had been entirely renovated and refitted in modern style since Jude’s residence here… Tinker Taylor drank off his glass and departed, saying it was too stylish a place now for him to feel at home in unless he was drunker than he had money to be just then… The bar had been gutted and newly arranged throughout, mahogany fixtures having taken the place of the old painted ones, while at the back of the standing-space there were stuffed sofa-benches. The room was divided into compartments in the approved manner, between which were screens of ground glass in mahogany framing, to prevent topers in one compartment being put to the blush by the recognitions of those in the next. On the inside of the counter two barmaids leant over the white-handled beer-engines, and the row of little silvered taps inside, dripping into a pewter trough… At the back of the barmaids rose bevel-edged mirrors, with glass shelves running along their front, on which stood precious liquids that Jude did not know the name of, in bottles of topaz, sapphire, ruby and amethyst.”

From the Project Gutenberg edition of Jude the Obscure, 1894.