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The Thoughts of Chairman Mick
Mick Lewis,
Chair of the North London Branch
Since the last issue, we have seen the publication of the 2001
edition of the Good Beer Guide. This book lists around 5000 UK
pubs that sell cask beer in very good nick, but you only have
to delve a little further to discover that it has considerably
more going for it than just a drinker's guide.
You could, of course, visit the Ostrich, when in the past, hotel
guests were murdered, then dropped by trapdoor from their beds
into a boiling cauldron. Pity it wasn't the Swan, which was once
a mortuary! You may think that a drink will put lead in your
pencil, but the Coledale Inn really was a pencil factory. At the
Clifton, they have three lottery millionaires who drink there.
Pity they don't use the Blacksmith's Arms, where they could land
their choppers on the pub's helicopter landing pad. For the more
energetic, the Barlow Mow has its own cricket ground for hire,
and the Three Horseshoes its own shooting gallery. For the very
adventurous, The Cock is less than a mile from the local railway
station - if you walk across fields! And for the less athletic,
the Bush has a marbles team.
You could visit the Alma and admire the piranhas that live in a
phone box, have soup in a basket at lunchtimes in the Queens Head,
book a Chinese banquet at the Wheatsheaf, eat lasagne made with
Robinson's Old Tom at the Swan With Two Necks, or go to the
Plough and buy your baguettes by the inch. You might want to
enter the marrow competition at the Gate Inn while you stare at
the log fire in the Warren House Inn, which has been burning since
1845. A different sort of fire burns at the Bell, where a Jaguar
engine is displayed in the Inglenook fireplace.
The Hare and Hounds was called The Scruffiest Pub In England by
the News of the World in 1993 - and I could go on and on. But I'll
leave you with the saddest pub of them all. You could be in the
Pilot - the closest pub to the Dome!!!!
If you want to know where all of these pubs are, you'll just have
to buy the book.
Mick Lewis
Reproduced from the Full Pint, Issue 7.
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