Trollied Tuesday: The Colton Arms

As vaguely promised, this week's Trollied Tuesday is in honour of Fancyapint's Best London Pub of the Past 10 Years.

Can pubs be understood in terms of music? I do hope so. If that is the case, then The Colton Arms may be compared to the best of Morrissey's work. (Now My Heart is Full, seems to sum it up ideally) It will not be to everybody's taste, for sure; but to those who appreciate it, there is nothing else quite like it.* That the pub is rather hard to find (I've managed to get lost in the back streets of Barons Court while trying to find it) adds to this hermetic feel.

Note this is not actually a trip back in time - just as well, the past could only disappoint. However, to step into this pub is to enter an imagined past, one in which civility, gentility and understated grace dominate, and to lament the more disagreeable aspects of modernity (loud music and. It's a pub for real ale, barmen in ties, dimpled pint pots and an almost vanished London - really it could be a black and white movie; some of the clientele appear to be extras in an Ealing comedy.

A session in a pub may have many characteristics; but to become elegaic takes something remarkable indeed.

Picture shamelessly borrowed from Fancyapint.

* Although the Churchill Arms, a pub that manages to be both English and Irish at the same time, may be even more Morrissean.

Trollied Tuesday: Fancy a pint?

This is as good a time as any to wish a happy 10th birthday to Fancyapint. If you wish to know what it is that makes the London pub great, look around.

I am not an unbiased source, of course, since I write the odd review for the site. And it is in this capacity that I shall be attending its annual awards bash tonight. Winners to be put up here when I get home/sober up sufficiently.

I might mark this auspicious event in a suitable fashion: visiting and reviewing the Lucky 7 in Cricklewood perhaps. (As the adage as it, anyone can get banned from a pub, to get banned from the Lucky 7 takes something special).

In the meantime, let me urge you again to help save the Great British pub by going to one.

UPDATE: A full list of the winners on Londonist. May I especially commend a couple of long-term personal favourites: the Jerusalem Tavern and the special award winner, the Colton Arms. The latter is not for everyone, but in a wholly good way. I might elaborate in a future Trollied Tuesday.

Trollied Tuesday: Won't Somebody Think of the Publicans

This is a story from the Irish Independent: Vintners seek govt action to boost pub trade.

If you were thinking that the fact Irish pub owners need government help to survive it's one of the signs of the apocalypse, you'd be right. Economically speaking at least.

Partly it's just the fact that the publicans' lobby is a pretty powerful and influential one (something to do with Ireland being a small country where much politicking is conducted at a local level and the fact that publicans have lots of dosh and local sway). But the figures quoted don't look good.

The Vintners Federation of Ireland... says 4,800 pub workers have been laid off in the past year.

It says 80% of pubs experienced a fall in profits of at least 10% this summer and half have had to let staff go.

The thing is the loss of the pubs is not going to have much effect on people's drinking habits, but it's damn well going to have a detrimental effect on people's well-being.

Unfortunately the current Irish government is the sort of shower that almost defines the phrase couldn't run a piss-up in a brewery (worse than Brown? I very much fear it is that bad), so I doubt state intervention of the sort they want will really work. The current big economic policy, the National Asset Management Agency, is basically an excuse to dig out the charlatans, chancers, gombeens, spivs and sleveens who colluded in a disastrous debt-fuelled property bubble. As such it is not very popular.

It's not really my business, but a truly courageous policy would be to nationalise the banks, let the developers go bust (and prosecute fraud effectively). Then spend some of the money saved on a giant piss up.

At the very least, the government could try convince people that the patriotic thing to do for the Irish to do would be to embrace the old fashioned image of being always in the pub. Some might feel uncomfortable returning to old, not always wholly complimentary stereotypes, but it would surely be preferable to the crass consumerism of the Celtic Tiger years. Possibly some sort of advertising campaign, with a poster of, some suitably iconic and respected Irish figure (Gay Byrne, say, or Roy Keane or Brian O'Driscoll or Father Jack or anyone really as long as it isn't that utter tosser Bono. Or Michael fucking O'Leary) urging people: I want YOU to go the pub. What do you reckon the chances of success would be?

* You could nick this famous picture of a Kerryman (really), but it might rake up a few of the less pleasant aspects of nationalism.

Trollied Tuesday: My Dark Places

Summer heat and the British drop the stoicism the better to display their collective inability to cope with this unexpected weather, a failure typified in attitudes to pub going.

The ideal summer pub, you see, is a darkened place where sheltered from the heat and the light and the frenzy you can transcend the physical here and now of summer. It should be calm and quiet too - at least all the silly sods will be out in the open air.

The problem is that soon as it gets warmish, the newspapers love to produce guides on the best places to drink in the summer; here is one from the Guardian, for example. I don't mean to pick on the Graun, much, because the publication doesn't really matter; you can pretty much guarantee that anywhere named in a newspaper as the ideal summer drinking spot will soon come to resemble no such thing.

Leaving aside the question as to whether you really want dozens of Guardian readers over-running an agreeable riverside boozer (of course not), these things are written under a flawed premise: that what you really want to do is spend hours out in the sun drinking.

A bit of sun's okay - fine if you're out for a swim or a stroll, and it's good that it draws out the young ladies flushed radiantly in their flimsy summer dresses; but for every one of those there will be a good half dozen lobster-red men who should know better in flip flops and shorts or women displaying acres of flesh that should be discreetly covered. People become fractious and loud. And as for dogs and children in the heat, words fail me.

For reasons that should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of self-awareness Britons, booze and hours of sunshine are a bad combination. Partly because it's so many people overdo the wrong stuff - strong, chemically enhanced lagers, white wine with the taste chilled out of it, or cheap cider. Mostly though it's a failure to understand that the pub is a shelter.

So just as in winter the sensible thing to do is hunt down somewhere with a fire, in summer the drinker's natural instinct is to find somewhere cavernous, dark and calm. Ideally you want a place of marbled stillness, or else a pub with dark wooden walls and high windows that only allow the odd sunbeam to pierce the still air. An old Victorian gin palace would be ideal (perhaps something like the Crown Liquor Salon in Belfast). The walls should have the patina and nicotine stains acquired through decades of serious drinking. (Alas that the smoking ban prevents one shrouding oneself in smoke the better to provide a barrier between the pub and the summer heat).

In other words, you want a place in which time is temporarily suspended, in which you can contemplate the graver mysteries of life, love and drinking. Naturally, you want the company to be small and select (not least because you do not want the busy, foolish clamour of the silly sods who will be spending hours out in the sunny swilling booze). If you cannot find anyone like minded, look for a place where the clientele understand the value of silence or who, through their dedication to the drinker's craft, have been temporarily rendered speechless. (These will at least be roused into life should any affected Guardian-reading tossers enter).

As for what to drink. First a practical note, any fool can serve beer in the winter, the summer heat will winnow out the pubs that can't keep a pint of beer in good cask condition. You could do worse than go for a summer special ale (Adnam's Regatta for instance), but why not follow the example of those who live in places like Africa and the Caribbean and drink stout? Guinness is great in the summer, just don't bother with that extra cool shite. You can't glug it, true, but that's probably a good thing, and its sweet, refreshing taste will restore your energy and enthusiasm when you feel sapped an enervated in the heat. It's dark and cool qualities encapsulate the attributes of the ideal summer pub.

I could tell you a few places that meet the criteria; but I'm not going to list them here. Don't want them over-run after all.

Hair of the dog bites man

Two subjects close to my heart and other vital organs: pubs and newspaper journalism. I've long thought that a study ought to be done into the effect a paper moving its offices has on the local pub trade. In the absence of that, I was delighted to stumble across the following vignette (from the Guardian's Wimbledon coverage of all things):

"All Guardian hacks are alcoholics!" That's the friendly and super-libellous-though-I-wouldn't-put-my-mortgage-on-it-in-court title of an email I've just been sent by Andy Underwood. "I was on a corporate induction yesterday and the afternoon session was a rather nice guided coach journey around the local area, taking in Farringdon. The only interesting fact that our guide had about Farringdon was that since the Guardian moved offices, three pubs have been forced to shut. Comments, please."

It would perhaps be too delicious were one of those pubs the notorious Griffin "Gentleman's Bar And Club" (as if gentlemen worked at the Guardian anyway). By contrast I have it from a highly reliable source (an Irish hack in the pub, if you must know) that a number of boozers in Victoria were facing the axe until the Telegraph moved in nearby.

But this is anecdotal. As I said, a proper study is needed. I am not sure that my A-level in economics would be quite sufficient to get funding (then again, it was a few years ago. It's probably on a par with a degree now) but I feel I should look into this matter further.

Trollied Tuesday: Ghost Pubs

There is a certain melancholy attached to a boarded up, derelict pub. It's not universal, admittedly, some places really deserve to close; but in general the ghosts of conversations, laughter, friendships and good times past linger forlornly around them.

One of the saddest such pubs can be found in Maida Vale, close to the Regents Canal on Aberdeen Place. Its name is Crockers Folly and there is a genuinely tragic tale attached to it. The Victorian grandeur of the place - its moulded plaster and ornate windows and the vast marble interiors, add to the sense of desolation now that it is closed, but its sheer size, its gaudyness and ambition, seem incongruous for such a quiet secluded street.




The story goes that its founder, a man called Frank Crocker, had believed that it would sit opposite the new Marylebone station, which was eventually built half a mile away. The pub was a white elephant from the start and Crocker killed himself by throwing himself from an upstairs window in the pub. Okay, like most such stories it is probably untrue; but as a myth it does nicely illustrate the overweening ambition that would put such a pub in such a place.

To the best of my knowledge it has been closed for several years. I have no idea who owns it nor what plans exist for its future. (A quick Google search leaves me little the wiser, it could be yours for £4.25 million, apparently). The estate agents ominously talk about its potential for conversion into flats (don't they know there's a property slump on?) - even though its a Grade II listed building. I hope these recent photographs convey something of its potential to be a prime drinking location.



As I said at the start of this post, the loss of a pub is something generally to be deplored; the loss of this seems sadder than most.

Trollied Tuesday: More pink

A couple of months ago I was bemoaning the difficulty in finding decent rosé. One reason for that might be the following story.

The war of the rosés is over. The European Commission announced today that it had abandoned its plans to allow European winemakers to make cheap rosé wine by mixing red and white wines together.

The announcement follows a rearguard action by traditional producers in France and Italy who feared that their growing market for pink wine would be flooded by cheap imitations.

The point is, of course, that cheap imitations from outside the EU are already being produced and are flooding the market. (There's plenty of cheap French rosé too, of course, but at least it's not an excuse to flog off two seperate wines that no one wants to buy).

Another indication of where the problem lies is a market that seems to reward idiocy.

When rosé producers in Provence and the Loire valley complained, Paris pressed for a compromise which would allow real rosé wines to be labelled as “traditional” or “authentic”.

This also infuriated the rosé producers. The booming new market for chilled rosé wine is largely a market amongst young people, they said. Labelling their wine “traditional” would give them a fuddy-duddy image.

God forbid we should upset the young ones. Surely in the case of wine – a product for which age is a positive virtue – tradition and authenticity are greatly to be valued? It's really not that difficult a concept to grasp: if you're buying electronics newness is a virtue, if you're buying booze it isn't. For most other things it all depends on context.

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In other why is this news?: American tourists in London visit tourist pub. Had Michelle Obama asked me I could have recommended some alternatives. That's irrelevant really, one gets the distinct impression that what appealed to her was the old school pub aspects of the place, hand-pulled ales and traditional pub food. Sadly we don't know whether or not she enjoyed a pint but, in broadly booze-related context, I think we can say she get the point. Authenticiy and tradition can be virtues.