Categories
pubs quotes

QUOTE: Nairn on Northern Pubs

“The Vines was built in the last year of the [19th] century and every majestic detail is kept up as good as new… Tall and luminous, brown and gold giant pilasters combining elegance with immense force, and huge Victorian paintings between. Sitting in it, you feel ten feet tall, for it is the kind of grandeur that raises you up rather than crushes you. Drinking beer which is both better and cheaper than the metropolitan brew — any kind of Liverpool bitter is a good drop — you realize that London has nothing like this.”

Ian Nairn in the essay ‘Liverpool’ first published in The Listener in 1964 and collected in Britain’s Changing Towns in 1967, reissued and updated in 2013. There’s more information about The Vines on the CAMRA pubs heritage website.

Categories
Beer history

John Lennon’s Quiet Pint Revisited

lennon_specs_474

‘In conclusion, there is some evidence that circa 1966 John Lennon made a remark about the difficulty of experiencing a “quiet pint” in a favorite Liverpool pub.’

So states a blog post by Garson O’Toole, the famous consulting quote investigator, responding to a query we made last year.

He has traced it back as far as Philip Norman’s 1981 muck-raking biography Shout! but not to source.

If you’ve got copies of magazines containing Bill Harry’s early Beatles writing, perhaps you’ll have more luck.