Categories
london pubs

The Lost art of Drawing Pubs

In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, there was a flood of books about pubs, many of which included illustrations.

London Pubs by Alan Reeve-Jones (1962) has many lovely drawings by artist Miriam Macgregor, who went on to become a well-respected engraver. Her rendition of the Mayflower in Rotherhithe is below.

The Mayflower pub, Miriam Macgregor, 1962.

When Assheton Gorton provided drawings of pubs for the 1973 edition of Martin Green and Tony White’s Evening Standard Guide to London Pubs, he also tackled the Mayflower.

The Mayflower pub by Assheton Gorton, 1973.

Both of the above are interesting and entertaining books, which cannot, unfortunately, be said of The Alka-Seltzer guide to the Pubs of London (1976). Its illustrations, by ‘Myerscough’, are quite nice, though. He, she or it unfortunately ignored the Mayflower, but instead created a block print of the nearby Angel at Bermondsey.

The Angel pub, Myerscough, 1976.

As colour printing got cheaper, beer books and pub guides became home to a certain kind of tasteful, arty photography, and illustrations like these became less common. These days, they tend to be filled with free images, snapped by the author on a phone or digital camera, or borrowed from the internet. That seems a shame.

Note: we’ve reproduced the images above in low-resolution for, er, illustrative purposes, and will remove them if asked to do so by copyright holders.

Categories
pubs

Bars and Pubs and Clubs

Dada bar in Sheffield.

Last week, we interviewed the founders and owners of North Bar in Leeds, arguably the first ‘craft beer bar’ in the UK, and, in the course of our conversation, asked: ‘So, what makes this a bar rather than a pub?’ After much head-scratching, they had to admit defeat: they didn’t know. ‘But we know a bar when we see one.’

Here’s a quiz, then: are the following bars, or pubs, or something else?

  1. Dada, Sheffield
  2. Craft Beer Company, Islington, London
  3. Craft Beer Company, Clerkenwell, London
  4. The Parcel Yard, Kings Cross, London
  5. any branch of All Bar One.

A pub has to sell beer, but then so do most bars. A bar is more likely to sell cocktails, but some don’t, and some pubs do. Pubs are more likely to be brown, while bars will have white/cream/grey walls, but white-painted pubs and brown bars do exist… no, this isn’t getting us anywhere.

In the introduction to her 2002 book Bar and Club Design, Bethan Ryder defines bars as follows:

They are modern, spectacular forums, underpinned by the ideas of display and performance, rather than utilitarian, more casual places in which people meet, drink and gossip — such as the pub…

We’re not sure that works — North felt pretty casual, for example, but is definitely a bar. She also, however, says this in attempting to define the nightclub: ‘…to a certain extent they have always been whatever a… pub is not.’ Now that, vague as it is, might work as a definition of a bar.

As, perhaps, might this: a pub should always feel as if it is in the British Isles; whereas a bar should feel as if it is in Manhattan, Stockholm, Moscow or Paris.

If you think you’ve got it cracked, let us know in the comments below.

Our answers would be 1) bar; 2) pub; 3) bar; 4) something else; and 5) chain pub with pretensions.

Categories
opinion pubs

The Wrong Type of Income

landlord_whitbread_1953

We have been thinking a lot about pub companies recently, not least because of the Fair Deal for Your Local campaign. We still don’t understand enough about the details of the business model to have a strong opinion on its rights and wrongs, but one thing has been puzzling us: why do pubcos bother selling beer?

Why do they bother maintaining a buying-sales-distribution network when they could just make money from renting at market rates to people who want to run a genuine freehouse?

We wonder if the answer is tax.

At present, our tax system distinguishes between trading income and letting income, with the former qualifying for many more ‘reliefs’ (tax breaks). This is because trading is seen to be generating ‘economic activity’ while letting and passively holding investments is not. So, from the pubcos’ perspective, rental is probably ‘the wrong type’ of income.

Can anyone who works in the industry, or at Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, confirm our deny our hunch?

Categories
pubs

A Cornish Village with no Pub

Beer glass symbol from Ordnance Survey map key.

Gorran Haven is an interesting place — proper seaside, where many Cornish coves are more Sea Salt. It has cones of chips, ice cream, sandcastles, and families nesting behind windbreaks on the beach, just like the holidays we remember from when we were kids.

What we discovered as we waited an hour and a half for our bus yesterday, however, is that the little pint mug on the Ordnance Survey map is somewhat misleading: Gorran Haven doesn’t have a single pub. Several churches, yes, but no pubs.

When we said this to a local, he disagreed and pointed. ‘Up the hill there,’ he said, before conceding, ‘Well, hotel bar, really.’ There is indeed a ‘bar bistro’ but it didn’t look like the kind of place we could tramp into in walking boots, dusted with yellow pollen, thirsting for pints and pork scratchings.

‘Well, the cafes are licensed, too,’ said our local expert. This is also true, but drinking bottles of Betty Stogs or San Miguel at a picnic table wasn’t really what we had in mind on this occasion.

We’re not complaining, just surprised. We’ve been to similarly-sized villages with more than one pub, and it’s unusual to find a corner of the Duchy that doesn’t at least have a St Austell house.

In the end, we were perfectly happy with two mugs of strong tea which we drank on the beach as the tide came in.

Categories
pubs real ale

A Scilly Pub Crawl

The Turks Head pub, Scilly.

There are pubs on four of the five inhabited islands in the Isles of Scilly and we couldn’t resist trying to visit them all.

First, in Hugh Town on St Mary’s — the nearest Scilly has to a bustling metropolis — we stopped in at the Mermaid, which sits on the harbour, not far from where the Scillonian drops off visitors from the mainland. Though it’s a pubco pub, it has special permission to sell local beer because of the challenge of keeping it supplied, and is decked out with gig racing paraphernalia. Unfortunately, on our visit, a beer from Ales of Scilly (Scuppered, we think) was just in the process of turning to vinegar, but a cosy atmosphere and Guinness saw us through.

Also in Hugh Town are Scilly’s two St Austell pubs. The Atlantic is huge but nonetheless has lots of corners to hide in. When freshly supplied, it has a decent selection of the brewery’s beers all of which were well looked after. We enjoyed a sarcastic pub quiz, surrounded by boaty types, along with pints of Trelawney and bottles of 1913 Stout.

Just up the road, the Bishop and Wolf (named after two lighthouses) offered an excellent pint of Proper Job along with the usual St Austell corporate interior decoration job. Nice enough but nothing to blog home about.

The last pub on St Mary’s is in Old Town and is called, obviously, the Old Town Inn. Being a little out of the way, we found it quiet, but, as the end of May approaches, were delighted to at last find a pint of mildTriple FFF Pressed Rat & Warthog — in decent condition and tasty enough to stay for more than one. We were made to feel very welcome and, when we left, got a round of goodbyes and ‘take cares’ from the locals perched at the bar.

The New Inn, Tresco.
The New Inn, Tresco, Isles of Scilly.

Thereafter, we were reliant on boats to reach pubs elsewhere in the archipelago. The New Inn on tropical Tresco, which we reached in the mid-afternoon, was all but empty. At one point, a bird hopped in through the door, ate some crisp crumbs under the pool table, and hopped out again. We found more mild — the lesser-spotted Black Prince! — along with Ales of Scilly Firebrand, which we found pleasant enough, if not earth-shattering. The real highlight, though, was kegged Harbour Brewing Pilsner which reminded us of really fresh, flowery beer from Würzburg or Regensburg. (It was, however, £2.50 for a half — ‘craft’ tax+tourist prices+Scilly supply premium?)

The Turks [sic] Head on St Agnes is yet another cosy nautically-themed tavern, though with a touch of Hampstead about it. Its house beer, Turks Ale, brewed by St Austell, has a pump clip designed by a former member of staff, and tasted to us as if it might be a blend of Proper Job and Tribute, though we stand ready to be corrected. St Austell’s seasonal special, Prince Albert, is a brown ale, and its accent on middling-dark malt flavours made a pleasant change. Skinner’s St Piran’s was in very good condition and is yet another decent golden ale from a brewery whose brown beers we don’t really like.

Fraggle Rock on Bryher almost didn’t make this list. It’s a cafe, really, but it does have draught beer and a pool table, and, at any rate, businesses on this small, quiet island have to do double duty. The views, especially from the garden, are stunning.

In conclusion, there are no bad pubs on Scilly, and, despite being out in the Atlantic, it offers a wider range of beers than most Cornish towns, and certainly more mild, in May at least. Don’t go there for the beer, but don’t worry that you’ll go thirsty, either.

Did we miss any? Let us know below and we’ll make sure to visit them next time.