Tag: portsmouth

Checking in with Brewhouse & Kitchen

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 7th June 2022
6 Comments on Checking in with Brewhouse & Kitchen

Our trip to Portsmouth gave us a chance to reappraise Brewhouse & Kitchen – a quietly successful chain built around onsite brewing.

We’ve been ambivalent about BH&K in the past.

Despite each having its own brewer, the individual bars trade under a collective name, with the same branding and similar décor.

As a result, they can feel a bit like business class Wetherspoons.

The beers rarely strike us as memorable, either, tending to the soft, hazy and, yes, homebrew-like.

The Southsea branch of BH&K.

Still, sitting in the Southsea branch on a Monday afternoon, we were struck by a few things.

First, how busy it seemed, given the time and day.

(We realise the above photo makes it look otherwise but that’s because we go out of our way to avoid snapping pictures of strangers.)

Secondly, the diverse range of people it served: solo retirees, young parents, ladies out lunching, students, builders…

Thirdly, some of the beer was strikingly good – specifically the Helles lager.

That latter was a false alarm, though, because we noticed “Brewed for us” on the menu and asked “By whom?”

Shepherd Neame, it turns out. We tend to forget that SN is a substantial UK lager producer.

The other beers were decent enough, though, on cask and keg, across a range of styles. It’s always nice to encounter a cask porter, for example.

At the end of our week in Portsmouth, on Friday lunchtime, we visited the city’s other branch, in the centre.

This was the very first BH&K, established in a former Wetherspoon pub, which was a former Brickwoods pub.

It felt warmer and more organically publike than the Southsea outlet.

There was brewing underway, too, filling the bar with the smell of hot malt.

Knowledgeable, enthusiastic staff were keen to talk about the beer and give clear recommendations.

We enjoyed a notably orangey Witbier and, on the barman’s advice, Rockingham American pale ale.

Both were solid, as good as many beers we encounter in craft beer focused pubs in Bristol. Think Left Handed Giant, for example.

“This is amazing!” said a bloke at the bar. “I’ve never heard of this place but look at all the different beers you’ve got. Weird thing is, I’ve got some friends who are proper ‘alers’ and they’ve never mentioned it once.”

And that’s true. You won’t hear “alers” talking about BH&K, just as they don’t tend to talk about Zero Degrees.

There’s something about chains that’s off-putting, however properly things are done. You don’t know the brewers, only the brand, and the beer can sometimes feel like an accessory designed to sell macaroni cheese and “small plates”.

We wonder if it might be different if each bar and brewery had it’s own name and identity.

Would “alers” feel warmer towards The Portsmouth Brewing Company at The White Swan?

Tags brewhouse and kitchen, brewpubs, portsmouth

pubs

Portsmouth: enough good pubs to fill at least a week

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 2nd June 2022

Portsmouth seems unusually well stocked with interesting independent pubs and we tried to hit the classics during our four nights in the city.

Combining intelligence from various sources our hit list was:

The Lawrence Arms
The Hole in the Wall
The Barley Mow
The Apsley House

The first place we actually visited, though, was The Brewhouse & Kitchen in Southsea, which happened to be a handy place to wait for check-in at our hotel. We’ll write a bit more about that in a separate post.

Then that evening we ended up at Huis, a Belgian bar, which we’d forgotten was in Portsmouth. We were impressed at its air of authenticity, its impressive beer list and reasonably priced house beers brewed by Huyghe in Ghent.

The Pembroke with its inviting corner door.

And as it happens, the first proper pub we visited was off list, too. Something about The Pembroke just appealed to us. Perhaps it was the open door breathing cool, beer-scented air on a hot afternoon. Maybe it was the glimpse of a Bass pump on the bar.

The Bass was decent, if not quite as exciting as Bass can be at its best, and we enjoyed the atmosphere. Thick carpet, brown wood, local gossip and the sense that a guv’nor with a nautical past was somewhere just out of shot.

The Apsley House up a back street off the seafront in Southsea.

The Apsley House had an afternoon buzz, Timothy Taylor Landlord, and Summer Lightning – a good start.

Unfortunately, though cosmetically perfect – clear gold – the Summer Lightning didn’t hit the spot.

It tasted how we’ve often found it to taste over the years, with its ups and downs. Funky in the wrong way. Musty and rubbery.

The fault of the beer rather than the pub, we think, but, not feeling it, we left after one.

The interior of The Barley Mow.

The Barley Mow was next. What an interesting pub. It felt almost like a village community centre with people coming and going on various missions.

The cask ale line-up was extensive but conservative – seven brown bitters, one stout.

Jess enjoyed Ringwood Forty-Niner and London Pride, both clear and in good condition. Ray, suffering the luck of the draw, got a faintly hazy, dirty-tasting Bass and a fainty hazy, dirty-tasting Gale’s (Fuller’s) HSB – abandoned halfway through.

A quiet corner at The Lawrence.

Our first attempt to visit The Lawrence Arms and The Hole in the Wall was scuppered by the fact that both are closed early in the week.

When we returned to The Lawrence on Wednesday afternoon, it was still closed: APOLOGIES OPEN AT 3:30 PM. As it was 3:18, we stood in the sun and waited, like several other thirsty nerds cluttering the pavements nearby.

“Sorry about that,” said the person who eventually opened the door. “We varnished some tables yesterday afternoon and it turns out one-hour varnish doesn’t dry in one hour.”

Inside, we found a large, somewhat sparse, utterly immaculate pub with an impressive line-up of cask ales. We latched onto Oakham Citra, of course, which was in astoundingly good condition and, we think, the cheapest thing on the beer list at £3 a pint.

Quiet at first, the pub got livelier as the afternoon wore on and people popped in on their way home from work, or on their way out.

It was hard to leave and hard to resist the urge to come back the next day, but there were other pubs to visit yet.

The price board outside The Hole in the Wall.

Saving for last what we’d been told was the best, we visited The Hole in the Wall on our last night in Portsmouth.

It’s certainly the type of pub we like a lot: low light, lots of clutter and greebling, and a mixed crowd.

There were four cask ales and three local beers on keg. Here, the tendency was towards golden ales, but our attention was grabbed by Marble Lagonda.

Now, we might have mentioned this before but we’re not mad about dogs. In fact, Jess has something bordering on a phobia. Here, they seemed to be coming at us from every direction. One stuck its head through a railing and tried to stick its tongue in Ray’s pint. Another came running along the bench, yapping at Jess.

Two others started snarling and barking at each other, putting us a bit on edge.

It says something about the quality of the beer and the venue that we managed three round before muttering, “For fuck’s sake…” and sloping off.

For us, then, the clear winner was The Lawrence Arms. It might even be a contender for the master list of great pubs, though we probably need another visit to confirm that.

Tags portsmouth

20th Century Pub pubs

Evidence of Brickwoods vs. United in Portsmouth

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 30th May 2022
4 Comments on Evidence of Brickwoods vs. United in Portsmouth

In Portsmouth, the Victorian and Edwardian pubs built by two competing breweries offer an interesting way of understanding and navigating the city.

We were tipped off to this by an architectural guide by Alan Balfour published in 1970.

In his three-page introduction, Mr Balfour dedicates a good chunk of text to pubs:

Later 19th century pubs, such as The Northcote Hotel and The Eastfield Hotel, are almost over-pretentious in contrast to their surroundings. This pretentiousness goes deeper than the street elevations – it confirms the separate identities of the two major brewers in the area at the end of the 19th century, Brickwoods and Portsmouth United Ales… The brewers’ house styles emerged towards the end of the century, United pubs being clad in a deep green tile on the ground floor, with arched openings, and light green glazed bricks above… Brickwoods developed an extravagant ‘Tudorbethan’ style, with endless variations in the pseudo-timber framing and decoration.

An Edwardian logo for Portsmouth United Breweries from the former Egremont Arms.

A Brickwood & Co Ltd sign on the former White Swan, now a branch of Brewhouse & Kitchen.

On our first wander through town, we spotted examples of both. Some were trading, others were derelict, and still others had become nurseries or shops.

Tags brickwoods, edwardian, portsmouth, victorian

20th Century Pub pubs

The Monckton, Portsmouth: a pub built under fire

Post author By Boak & Bailey
Post date 6th December 2020
4 Comments on The Monckton, Portsmouth: a pub built under fire

Something unusual happened in 1942: a new pub came into being. That’s right – not an inter-war pub, or post-war, but one built right in the thick of it.

When we wrote 20th Century Pub back in 2015-17, we included a chapter on the wartime pub because it felt important. Other chapters were about new developments and new types of pub coming into being; this was about recording a void, or pause.

Pubs weren’t built or opened during World War II, they were destroyed. Even if there had been a will to build, there was a shortage of manpower and building materials.

Of course there were odd exceptions: pubs whose construction was underway before the war, completed just over the line; and temporary pubs in shacks, sheds and stables which appeared later on.

But the Monckton in Portsmouth is, we think, the first example we’ve come across of a somewhat substantial, somewhat solid pub actually being built during World War II.

We say ‘somewhat’ because, well, look at it. A single storey, raw brick, no embellishments and windows like those of a pillbox. If you told us it was converted from an air-raid shelter, we wouldn’t doubt it.

Here’s what Philip Eley and R.C. Riley have to say in their excellent 1991 monograph on the Portsmouth pubs between 1900 and 1950:

[It employed] a beerhouse licence transferred from the Dockyard Tavern, Marlborough Row (which had been enveloped by the Dockyard extension)… The site had been bought by United Breweries in 1911, and remarkably, in the light of the ersatz nature of the ultimate construction, the first application for a licence in 1928 was backed by a design from [important local architect A.E.] Cogswell himself. Four subsequent unsuccessful applications between 1929 and 1939 can hardly have presaged what was arguably Portsmouth’s most distinctive drinking house until its closure in 1982.

The picture above, sourced from the same booklet, was taken in 1946 so this was clearly the pub in its finished state, not under construction as suggested here.

That page at closedpubs.co.uk includes another picture of the pub, though, prettied up in the post-war period, with rendering, whitewash and some cute external adornments.

Copnor Road in 1972 with The Monckton in the background, via The News, Portsmouth.

Like many make-do-and-mend pubs of the 1940s and early 1950s, The Monckton survived longer than might have been expected, still trading into the 1980s.

What isn’t immediately obvious is why construction of this pub was authorised during a time of restrictions.

“Bet this was controversial,” we said to ourselves and it didn’t take long to find evidence that, yes, it was, in the form of a letter to the Portsmouth Evening News published on 13 February 1942:

Sir – On Sunday night I listened to Sir Stafford Cripps giving his very interesting and informative talk on Russia’s mighty effort to win the war. During this talk every listener was more or less asked, by Sir Stafford, to search his or her conscience as to whether they were engaged on or doing 100 per cent, work and thought, to bring about the same conclusion… I always feel that it is not fair to judge a nation’s effort by one own city or locality. There would, however, appear to something wrong in Portsmouth when I notice this afternoon a new public-house being built on Copnor Road. Surely the men engaged in this contract, and the materials being used, could be put to our war effort, at this critical time? I know the answer will be “a licence was granted,” but what right had that particular public servant to grant such a licence? He was given his present position to control the building industry and direct its use to the war effort, not to evade the Government Order (Restricting New Buildings) by issuing permits. It appears to that we want quite a number of men in key positions who can say and definitely mean it.

Our guess, pending further research, is that it was a question of morale.

Portsmouth lost 73 pubs to enemy action during 1940-41 and Eley and Riley reckon more than a hundred had been destroyed by February 1942.

Perhaps sparing a few bricks for the construction of a basic two-room pub felt worth it.

Tags hampshire, portsmouth, war, world war ii