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Beer history london pubs

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.

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Beer history london 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.

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pubs

The pleasure of the random pub

From Norman Garstin's 1889 painting of Penzance promenade, 'The Rain it Raineth  Every Day'. (The Bath Inn is up the road on the left before the red brick hotel.)
From Norman Garstin’s 1889 painting of Penzance promenade, ‘The Rain it Raineth
Every Day’. (The Bath Inn is up the road on the left before the red brick hotel.)

When we lived in London, we were always wandering around the city, either for fun or because public transport had collapsed, and used to visit new pubs all the time as a result: “This looks nice, let’s pop in.”

But even in Penzance, where we’ve lived for nearly two years, and which isn’t quite as big as London, it turns out there are still good pubs to be found. We must have walked past the Bath Inn a hundred times but never thought to go in, until last night, when the north wind had us seeking shelter just off the promenade.

There was the usual moment’s hesitation on the threshold (once you walk into a pub, it takes some nerve to turn on your heel and walk straight out, if its particularly hairy) followed by relief on entering: all the signs were good, from the polished brass to the homely atmosphere and sounds of murmured conversation. The woman behind the bar — surely the landlady? — gave us a smile and a bit of chat, even though she’d never seen us before. (Apparently, some publicans think you have to earn anything other than a scowl over time.)

It’s a huge building, it turns out, with two rooms at the front, a large beer garden (not a crappy yard) and, at the end of what you might call a banqueting hall, another bar. Despite its size, it felt warm, cosy and, yes, properly pubby.

We drank the new St Austell seasonal, Ruck and Roll, which, thankfully, didn’t taste too strongly of rugby, and Sharp’s Own — both in good nick — and watched Friday evening get going.

Darts players, fifteen or so of them, colonised one section, bantering and knocking back vases of lager; a few older chaps installed themselves at the bar and did some serious contemplative drinking with bags of crisps for dinner; a few young couples found quiet corners to flirt in; a party of middle-aged northerners, perhaps on an out-of-season break, ordered pints of “smooth” (for the men) and white wine (for t’lasses).

This pub seems very much alive, because it does its thing well, with confidence, and people come. Simple.

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opinion pubs

How far has the idea of craft beer spread?

Beer bottle: Harbour Porter No 6

In this post, we’re using ‘craft beer’ to refer to breweries who define themselves or some of their products using that term.

As people ponder the contrast between beer consumption and brewery numbers, two views are emerging at extremes of the spectrum of opinion:

1. Beer has begun its inevitable and long-awaited ascendancy — soon every pub will stock a vast range of interesting beer, there’s no reason the number of breweries should ever stop rising, and everyone will be drinking it. Just look at London. Soon, everywhere will be London! Endless London! Rejoice!

2. Beer is doomed — craft beer is a pathetic little bubble — an idea with no appeal to anyone but geeks. You can’t judge anything by what’s going on in that London. Look at downward overall beer consumption and pub numbers and repent, crafterati! Repent!

From our vantage point up here on the fence, we’ve seen some evidence that craft beer is an idea that is breaking out, if not, perhaps, ‘sweeping the country’, and has some distance left to run.

Our recent trip to Falmouth left us rather astounded as we realised that, in a town with a population of 20,000, there are at least four pubs/bars selling bottled and kegged craft beer (e.g. Five Degrees West, Beerwolf, The Front, Hand Bar) and apparently doing well at it. Self-consciously ‘craft’ local breweries like Rebel of Penryn and Harbour seem to be gaining a foothold in an increasing number of outlets, and the ‘craftier’ end of Sharp’s output is getting easier to find. There’s even a posh off-licence which stocks Mikkeller — one of the horsemen of the craftpocalypse?

Let’s move the goalposts, though, before someone else does: Falmouth is a university town, and full of middle class yachting types, so it doesn’t paint a true picture. What about the real world, Lord and Lady Fauntleroy?

Dammit. Banged to rights. In ‘working towns’ in Cornwall (definition on demand), we’ve seen less evidence of craft beer in the wild. Oddly, it is Molson-Coors-owned Sharp’s that are perhaps having the most impact: it’s a shock to walk in to a bog standard pub and find beers such as Stuart Howe’s Triple A — a cask ale fermented with Belgian yeast — or Hayle Bay Honey IPA, alongside Doom Bar, the ultimate sweetly bland ‘Cornish ale’. The grizzled fellers propping up the bar might find his experiments a bit ‘weird’, but these beers do seem to sell, perhaps because they’re strong.

Otherwise, though, it’s cafes, restaurants and gourmet burger joints where craft beer pops up most often, but, even then, it’s likely to be alongside bottles of execrable contract brewed but nicely branded ‘gift shop beer’, or skunked Corona-aping ‘Cornish lager’: there’s not much indication that local restaurateurs are really engaged with beer in the same way they are with, say, beef, or bread.

If, in six month’s time, there is a craft beer bar in Truro (not a ‘pop up’), and a pub in Penzance which regularly stocks Harbour or Rebel, then we’ll feel comfortable saying that ‘craft beer’ has gone at least a little bit mainstream. Until then, it remains a noisy niche.

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pubs

Beerwolf Books, Falmouth

Beerwolf Books

We’d heard a few mentions of Beerwolf Books, which opened in Falmouth, Cornwall, in the run up to Christmas, and had understood that it was either a bookshop with beer, or a pub with some books for sale. Either way, it sounded like something different, and so we made sure it was on our list of places to visit during a weekend away in the coastal town.

Even approaching Beerwolf feels like you’ve stumbled upon a secret: it’s up an easy-to-miss alleyway between chain stores, in a beautiful eighteenth century building on Bells Court. Through the red door, there’s a creaking wooden staircase and a view of shelves of books. So it is a bookshop. Then the smell of beer and the sound of chatter drift down. So it is a pub.

With deep red walls, dark wood, furniture neither too neat nor too tatty, and just enough daylight through small-paned windows, the pub part of Beerwolf (the bit we were most interested in) appealed immediately. The book shop, off to one side, and with a place to rest your beer while you browse, sets the mood, positively inviting long reading or writing sessions amid the buzz of conversation.

The beer is good, too. Very good. Among five cask ales, none of them the usual suspects, were 80 Shilling from local brewery Rebel (grainy, dark and silky), Marble Manchester Bitter (the kind of pale and hoppy beer that makes us consider a move up north some time) and our favourite Penzance Brewing Potion 9. In the fridges, a few Belgian standards such as Kwak and Chimay — not the stuff to excite hardened beer geeks, perhaps, but little seen in Cornwall.

We set up camp for the afternoon, watching and listening. What appeared to be a contingent of local CAMRA members staked out the bar and worked their way through the full range, murmuring their appreciation. Students came in pairs or gangs, buying piles of books and lots of lager, tea and coffee. Middle-aged couples came for the books and stayed for a pint. A stag do came for pints and walked away with some books. “Wow!” said more than one person on reaching the top of the staircase.

Struggling book and record shops: we urge you to find a struggling pub and pair up. Supermarkets, with their idea of offering several services on one premises, might just be on to something.