(and emsk and stev!e ch!ck) wz v.nice, w.plenty of top rockchat, and they said they enjoyed their sandwiches, which is good bcz i suggested we go to angel’s cheap and languid courtyard cafe, even though i (afterwards) recalled i had the second worst cup of coffee of my life their once BUT
my greek salad was anti-rockist to say the least viz: brie is not feta — where are the olives? — should this have a DRESSING huh?
CAMRA have pub preservation officers in their local groups. Just a note that the one in North London has been doing a pretty bad job of it lately. Three pubs of my acquaintance have closed down, or even knocked down in the last couple of months. But then it strikes me that CAMRA would not mind at all, as these are pubs which CAMRA themselves do not care for.
Start with the biggest surprise. The Crown on New Oxford Street, currently shut. Is it for renovation? Doesn’t look like it. The Crown was a Sam Smith’s pub, and I don’t think CAMRA like them. Not sure, but they like the action of a pump wot you don’t get in Smith’s pubs. The Crown was by no means their best pub, and the Lousy is very near, so it is no great loss. Except it had a rather spacious outside area, on the triangle at the end of Shaftesbury Avenue which was nice for a summer pint of Fatman.
Still, a few doors down The Old Crown, which always looked newer, has been completely gutted. A Pub/Bar on three floors it rocked a bit of Art Deco styling and was definitely on the bar end of Trendy. Still a niceish place though, and with an unusual interior. But unusual does not equal horse brasses and Victoriana, so why would CAMRA care. Looks like this is being refurbed into something else mind.
But the biggest shock was coming down York Way and seeing that the Waterside Inn WAS NOT THERE. You could see all the way to Kings Cross basin. There was a hole where the pub used to be. Now, don’t get me wrong, the Waterside Inn was a wretched pub, all late eighties red brick, boxy lack of charm and the odd faux beam inside. BUT it was absolutely emblematic of its age. If you wanted to describe an original eighties pub, you could not do better than the Waterside Inn. It was the first pub in Britain to have a Pizza Hut INSIDE IT (A terrible idea, but let us honour lousy ideas). A nice terrace by the canal was spoiled by horrible beer. But the place was seminal. Possibly too seminal to be one of the nearest pubs to Kings Cross when the Eurostar rocks in. But it did not deserve to DIE. Its like CTRL chased it on to a platform and, well you know…
Where were CAMRA then eh? I’ll tell you. Drinking in The Wenlock Arms slapping their backs at some tasty Robinson’s brew. Which is nice work if you can get it but not what a Pub Preservations Officer should be doing I wager.
Continuing CAMRA baiting week, I grab a copy of North London CAMRA’s monthly free sheet The Full Pint last night. Full of wonderful revelations, including the article about which postcodes are in North London Branch’s remit. Fascinating. But it was nice to see The Oakdale Arms, Carsmile’s local, getting pub of the year. Less nice to see that it might be getting knocked down.
What was most pleasing though to see, was the lack of the Thoughts Of Chairman Mick. This was a regular column where the errant leader of North London CAMRA would muse on something, usually beer related, and make conclusions that made no sense (probably beer related). But Chairman Mick is nowhere to be found. What has happened to him? And his incoherent thoughts? Too much Budvar Dark?
(The Full Pint also reveals that the Lord John Russell is the only place in Britain where you can get Budvar Dark on tap).
Despite my love of all things ale-y I have never made it to the Great British Beer Festival, mainly out of laziness rather than solely due to my disdain for CAMRA. Clearly Thursday is out of the question though, “just a bit of fun” or not, they are called tw@ h@s for a reason…
Also, is this anyway to celebrate what would have been the queen mum’s (gawd bless ‘er) 105th birthday? I imagine Youngs will be pulling out of the event in protest…
Liz D, a good friend of many of us, and a regular contributor to Pumpkin Publog, was killed in the bombings in London on July 7th.
This is a compilation of links to Liz’ posts to this blog. I was planning to put together some of my favourites and put them in the essays section. Looking at them again this morning I realised they were all worth reading. They were a small part of her online presence, and a tiny part of what made her special. But they do have some of the wit, gusto and elegance that made it such a pleasure and privilege to know her. And if you didn’t know Liz, but you do know food – then prepare for a treat.
How to be a domestic goddess (Sept 04): “we spent a good and very enjoyable hour getting thorns stuck in our shins while scrambling through brambles in search of the wily blackberry, many of which we scoffed messily instead of placing safely in our capacious punnets.”
Frogspawn for the new millennium (July 04): “Adding the reserved semolina and stirring it all together in a large chunky wine glass, I congratulated myself on the creation of a fine-looking beverage and then swigged the lot.”
Mystery Meat (July 04): “Meat that looks like more or less like it did when it was walking around scares people.”
I have always enjoyed sucking bones (Feb 05): “We fitted our two together and speculated about how far along the tail they’d come from, poking fork tines curiously into the spinal canal.”
Salad for men (August 04): “Reader, I made a salad.”
Indie Chicken: probably Liz’ most famous contribution to the Publog, a series of reviews of late-night greasy chicken houses, the kind that seem horridly welcoming when the pubs shut. Further indie chicken here, here and here.
A whole kilo of MEAT: “Now, Czech cuisine really does not muck about, one good reason for visiting in winter being that you need healthy walking around in the cold to burn off the damned food.”
yuk vagonu tekerlek (Aug 04): “A strange sense of otherness swept over me, like being on holiday and eating a custard cream, only different and foreign.”
Filthy, dirty and wrong (Jun 05): “Mix peanut butter with real butter and far too much sugar, pack into tin and press down firmly. Pour melted chocolate over the top. When set, cut into bits. Fill face. Feel slightly sick.”
O emporia! O mores! (May 05): “The piles of beautifully packaged tea, the extensive range of mustards, the vats of buffalo mozzarella: all this overloads the senses like a very expensive hangover.”
And from her first post here, introducing herself:
“I like cooking and eating but am no Heston Blumenthal. I am very easily bored and thus a novelty junkie, but always return to old favourites that my granny taught me as a mere spawnling in her terribly English country kitchen. There really is no equal to gorging oneself on toast spread sumptuously with fresh guinea-fowl egg lemon curd that contains not a little of one’s own fingers, grated finely and enthusiastically along with the zest.”
RIP Liz, and thanks.
Tom in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
By this point your intrepid reporter was flagging. The Paradise was the busiest pub we’d been in since the Elgin, several hours before, and clearly there were people who had been there all day, solely to watch the event (it was the only place we didn’t get a seat). The television was a decent size and the volume was loud, but not Elgin loud. There also appeared to be some sort of post-gay pride party going on upstairs and the music (heard whilst visiting the toilet) was an awful lot better than the dreck served up to us downstairs. WHO stumbling through the CSI greatest hits followed by <gritted teeth>pink floyd</gritted teeth> (sorry Marcello, loved the piece but I won’t be converted I fear). The pub seemed friendly enough, I had a bit of a natter with a random bloke, but it wasn’t my round and by this stage of the evening I was on the lemonade, so I can’t even comment on the beer.
Unfortunately I felt the need to leave as Wish You Were Here started in case I upset any of the other punters in the pub (also, we were in West London and I wanted to be the right side of Kings Cross before Hyde Park kicked out). My abiding memory of the pub though was some bloke (I don’t want to be stereotypical here, but the word “trustifarian” springs to mind) shouting at everyone to shush because they were showing a repeat of the Nelson Mandela speech from earlier in the day…
PUB 8 RATING: 7 (i’m sure it’s perfectly tolerable most of the time, it’s hardly their fault about pink floyd)
There is something gothic in the way this pub towers over the low-level business units surrounding it, the pub’s name, high up, broadcasts across the Sainsbury’s car park to the Paddington Rail Crash memorial stone. The first thing I googled about this bouzer was the phrase “Gruddy boozer with sticky carpets, undead locals and a telly blaring away. Sinister”. It was a must for Pub 8.
It lived up to this googled rep quite well, though i don’t recall carpet underfoot. It’s the sort of pub that has a memory of once having had a sawdust and straw floor. There was only a sprinkling of regulars, it felt decidedly empty, and there was (for me) a distinct lack of atmosphere. I don’t remember staying here very long. Look, it was a long pub crawl. God knows who was on stage in Hyde Park at this point – maybe the Spice Girls had reformed.
Much as I’d looked forward to trying the place out, and nice though it might be to try again, it did not match the day’s mood well. This meant that the upside to my earlier ineptness at losing a pub (one i couldn’t remember ever passing to be honest) meant that the finale in Pub 8 had to be had across the Harrow Road…
PUB 8 RATING: 6 (a quiet spot for ale drinking. YMMV – your memory may vary)
We escaped the friendly man, and hushed tones were reserved for the grand sight of THE COWSHED. Rising in the distance it really is a very impressive pub from the outside. Not so much due to any great architecture, just the way it juts majestically out of the side of the rise on Ladbroke Grove, before you get to Sainsbury’s.
We had also heard that it was
a) the pub from Time Gentlemen Please (a sitcom I had never seen)
b) the pub frequented by Avalon staffers (people I do not know)
c) rough.
Well it was not rough, but it was not exactly salubrious. Eyebrows were raised at the provenance of the weak sweet wine, and the beer selection was more than basic. Still, we were pissed by now so who cares? Feelings of drunkenness were increased by television action. There was a largish screen which seemed out of sync with the other television. It transpired that we had the ability to watch the digital/terrestrial delay in action. A little bit arsed up when someone asks to turn it up, leaving a lopsided sonic catastrophe. Still, it was Sting & Mariah Carey…
PUB 8 RATING: 4 (Poor bouze, head fuck sonics and not even as rough as we had hoped)
Over the road, past the fire station and halfway through the crawl, The Eagle was a welcome change. Livelier than The Earl Percy and with a louder television. Just in time for the Scissor Sisters to do a new song – surely a bad idea. Luckily, the Eagle was the home of bad ideas, especially when someone thought it would be a good idea to put Velvet Revolver on.
So far we had not really interacted with general public. We had not raised awareness. Luckily The Eagle broke this duck by providing us with a genuine Pub Nutter. A large drunk chap, tattoed within an inch of his life who started to say how great Velvet Revolver were, and then managed to turn this into a twenty minute diatribe on The Stone Roses.
Admittedly I did not help by talking back. But he was a friendly cove who constantly tried to buy me a drink and did not want to beat me up for drinking a glass of white wine (I don’t really know why I got a glass of white wine in here).
Oh and how do you get to the Stone Roses from Velvet Revolver? Simple. Slash was in Guns’n'ROSES. And VR’s singer was in the STONE Temple Pilots. Frankly, this is far too logical for a pub nutter.
PUB 8 Rating: 7 (Almost all for the entertaining pub nutter who was nowhere near as fearsome as his tats suggested.)
There was actually another pub in between the Elgin and the Earl Percy but the consensus, shared it seems by Fancyapint’s lack of listing, is it was a bit rough. This may seem laughable seeing what is coming up, but we also felt an extra bit of walking might distance us from Snow Patrol.
No such luck. We made it to the Earl Percy and Run was still on. A veritable Telegraph Road for a new generation, we moaned, and got a look. Indeed all the time we were in the generally okay Earl Percy we were subjected to “looks” from the old bloke on his own on the table next to us. Live 8 was on a small TV, pretty quiet and this old giffer was having none of it. He was also having none of our dissection of Live 8 either. Indeed if one was to sum up his character, having none of it would be enough.
The Percy itself is a slightly shabby bouzer in a few segments, notable for its very small door between two bars. The Killers got to do their one song, and then we had a little discussion about the relative merits of the Scissor Sisters. The giffer however was having none of it, so we left.
PUB 8 RATING: 4 (served us beer, had a TV on, but we were having none of it).
(July, 2005)The food and drink section of Freaky Trigger - a home to anything remotely to do with eating, drinking and the experiences formed around them. Pubs, restaurants, food links - what music is to the ears, the publog attempts to do to the eats.
It is no longer just about pubs (though they will turn up I don't doubt) if it goes in your mouth - it goes in Pumpkin Publog.
