A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by Will Hawkes

This month’s edition is sponsored by the London Brewers’ Alliance Festival and Bird House Brewery

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House Party

These are tough times for London’s small breweries, but you wouldn’t know it on a sunny Thursday evening in Herne Hill. At 7pm, the alleyway that connects the Bird House Brewery’s varied railway arches is alive with noise and chatter, its tables almost universally occupied, its clientele notably more female than is typical - a reflection, perhaps, of the brewery’s modern aesthetic and this smart neighbourhood’s demographics. 

Later this month, Bird House will host the London Brewers’ Alliance Festival (see below for full details), which returns after a year off. Much has changed in that time. The festival’s most recent iterations (in 2018, 2019 and 2023) took place at the Griffin Brewery, home of Fuller’s, the historic brewery now owned by Asahi. The shift feels significant: this year’s event is focused on smaller breweries, on independent breweries, on reminding drinkers of the value of locally-made beer.

London has lost plenty of local beer over the past few years. Hackney, Wild Card, ORA, Beerblefish and others have recently closed: many others, from Brew By Numbers to Fourpure, now exist purely as brands, brewed far from their original home, mostly outside London. You might easily assume that the spirit that animated London brewing for a decade weakens by the day. 

It doesn’t seem so at Bird House, though, which buzzes with human enjoyment. Even here, there’s a reminder of London brewing’s recent difficulties (this was home to Canopy Beer Co until 2022, and Bird House is even still using some of Canopy’s equipment) - but Bird House is clearly a different animal to its predecessor. Founded by Frazer Timmerman and William Fuller, it’s part of a bar-first business, with The Hawks Nest in Shepherds Bush Market (2019) and Peckham Arches (2022) existing before the brewery began last year. 

And Bird House is as much a bar as a taproom. It sells a lot of cocktails, there’s DJs on Fridays and Saturdays, the first arch you come to as you enter from Norwood Road doesn’t feel like a brewery taproom, despite the beer taps (including a handpump) on the bar. There’s pizza, too. “We don’t want to say to people, ‘this is all about beer and you have to like beer,” says Will Hiscocks, head brewer. “That’s a point of difference from [many of the] breweries that preceded us, where the focus was so much on beer.”

This is driven as much by necessity as anything else. Archway brewing has become many times’ harder since Network Rail sold its railway arches in 2019 to a group now known as the Arch Company. Brewing on its own isn’t enough to make it work, financially at least: you need more to ensure the bottom line remains healthy. 

In the case of Bird House, this has led to some smart thinking. On-site, beer is served from 500-litre tanks, all of them bought from upscaling or failing London breweries for a fraction of what they might have cost first-hand. That’s one big plus of London’s struggling brewery scene: plenty of bargains to be had. Will says the beer stays fresh in the tank for a month - courtesy of “a system to keep the oxygen really low” - although lager and pale shifts in much less time. 

Will came to Bird House from Edinburgh, where he’s been studying at Heriot-Watt and working at the Hanging Bat. Despite the basic nature of some of the kit (which is in line for an overhaul, including a fancy new water filter that’s currently being installed) he’s put together an impressively clean and flavoursome line-up, taking in Lager, Pale Ale, Nitro Stout, Amber Ale and a White IPA. Whole-leaf hops are used. 

“We do want to play around with different styles, but actually our focus is on the process,” he says. “How do we make that better? My greatest aspiration is to make our lager [which makes up about 60 percent of sales] as appealing to Joe Bloggs as it is to a beer nerd.”

At the back of the site are four tanks emblazoned with Meantime’s logo, a remnant of the now Asahi-owned brand’s foray into tank beer around a decade ago, when Meantime’s beer was still brewed in its ancestral home of Greenwich. They'll be cleaned up and installed at Bird House’s fourth bar, soon to open in the capital. These are tough times for London breweries, no doubt about it, but there’s still plenty of life out there. 

“During Covid and for a few years after, it felt like there was a bit of a lull in the London Craft beer scene,” says Frazer. “We really want to show that there’s a whole bunch of [London] breweries that are flourishing and trying to keep beer in London going. I think this festival is a great opportunity for people to come and see where the London beer scene is at.”

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Token Effort

The first LBA festival (“The London Brewers Showcase”) took place at Brew Wharf, a brewpub in Borough that no longer exists, 15 years ago. (The second took place 14 years ago, at Vinopolis, a wine-focused visitor attraction that also no longer exists). Plenty of the breweries that participated in 2010 are still going concerns, though: Redemption, The Kernel, Camden Town, Fuller’s, to name four that have taken divergent paths in the years since. Phil Lowry, the driving force behind the LBA and then brewer at Brew Wharf, now sells hops in the USA. 

For some reason, I still have some tokens from one of the showcases - feast your eyes! This film, meanwhile, offers a reasonable idea of how things were then. 

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Floral Revival

The Florist Arms, a good-looking pub in Bethnal Green, has been taken on by Barley Pop, the company behind Mother Kelly’s and King Cross’s Queen’s Head. They reopened the pub last week, but - according to Barley Pop supremo Nigel Owen - “a lot of work” is needed on the pub. Planning for that is currently underway.

Meanwhile, Stockwell’s Mawbey Arms is to reopen 8 years after closing, albeit with the addition of a hotel. Developers KAZ Hotels got the thumbs-up from Lambeth Council this week to add a 28-room hotel to the Mawbey in SW8.

The Fox in Haggerston, once one of East London’s key beer addresses, is also reopening after a long closure. 

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This is a Low

The Lowlander, one of London’s few Belgian beer bars, has shut. The bar, which opened at the turn of the century at a time when Belgo had popularised Belgian bars in the capital, never boasted the most exciting beer list - but it was Belgian, so there was always something worth drinking. It’s been replaced by the Marlborough Head, an Urban Pubs venue. 

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Óisín’s New Scene

London’s most famous landlord and the man behind Soho’s Devonshire, Óisín Rogers, is opening a new pub in Mayfair alongside the team behind Hammersmith’s Crisp Pizza. The Marlborough will feature pizza in the basement with a more traditional pub space upstairs. 

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Stow Aways

Hackney Church Brew Co is expanding. The Bohemia Place operation is moving its main brewing operation to Walthamstow - but will still be operating out of its Hackney site too. They expect to be operating on the Blackhorse Road by the New Year. 

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Mild Affair

Garrett Oliver, brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery and author of the best book about beer and food matching, is appearing at Bethnal Green’s Kings Arms on Sunday 21st for “an evening of great beer, laughs and storytelling”. Strong Dark Mild, Oliver’s recent collaboration with Thornbridge, will be available alongside other Thornbridge beers. 

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Two Pubs, One City: 

Duke of York, Borough; Fox and Firkin, Lewisham

Reading this excellent profile of David Bruce, the man who created Firkin pubs, sent me into an involuntary flashback last week. Although I’m not quite old enough to remember it when Bruce was in charge - he flogged the company in 1988 - I do recall the fag-end of the Firkin empire. In 1998/99 I lived about two minutes’ walk from the Finn and Firkin, an imposing 19th-century boozer on the Pershore Road in Birmingham.

I remember Dogbolter, a beer I avoided because it was too strong. I remember the L-shaped bar, and the smelly loos next to one entrance. I remember the huge dance hall/concert venue attached to the back. And I remember, for reasons I still can’t truly understand, being unnecessarily rude to a Stoke-supporting friend when he entered the pub one Saturday evening having just watched his team lose 3-0 (although, checking Stoke’s results, they didn’t actually lose 3-0 in 1997-98. Maybe it was 4-0? Or 4-1). 

(The pub stopped being a Firkin soon after and is fully shut now).

Anyway, enough of that. The Firkin chain didn’t start in Birmingham, but in South London: Borough in 1979 and then, a short while later, Lewisham. Both pubs are still operating, albeit not as part of the same chain anymore. Can you see where I’m going with this?

Borough Road must have changed a lot since July 1979, when the Goose and Firkin opened in a former Truman’s pub here. London was at its population nadir back then, a city of just 6m people, and even relatively central areas like Borough were off the map for snootier Londoners. 

It wasn’t somewhere people went for fun. The Ministry of Sound, which is just down the road, didn’t open until 1991; Borough Market as a public-facing food destination was a creation of the late 1990s. Eighties Borough was a very different place.

They were queuing down the street when the Goose and Firkin opened, though, by all accounts. Well, they’re not today, on a blustery Wednesday afternoon. They’re not even queuing at the bar; indeed, the only other customers are a couple sitting at a high table, discreetly discussing work. 

And that’s not the only difference. There’s no cask ale, despite this being a Shepherd Neame ale. 

“Do you sell ale?” I ask.

“No,” replies the friendly young woman behind the bar. “We used to.”

“But no-one ordered it?” 

(Embarrassed silence.)    

In the absence of cask, I order a pint of Sheps’ new nitro Stout (£6.95). It’s watery, resolutely un-roasty, with a touch of butterscotch. Slightly less enjoyable than Guinness. 

The pub has more character than the beer, happily, although largely courtesy of its location. There’s an appealingly basic railway bridge right outside, and regular buses scoot past the front door: the 344 to Clapham Junction is very busy! Inside, it’s a big open room, with lots of high tables and a worn wooden floor - worn enough that it may be the pub’s sole remnant of the Firkin years, with the exception of the Duke of York frieze above the main entrance. 

Excitement arrives when a bloke enters to use the loo, subsequently emerging to buy a pint as payment. He peruses the Sheps options on the bar, orders a pale ale, before realising Hurlimann is available and apologetically swaps to that. Then - as if that wasn’t enough thrills - he orders a sandwich, despite having a peanut allergy. It has got nuts in it, he’s told - but they’re not peanuts so they're fine. And anyway, he adds, “I’ve got my epipen with me!” The girls behind the bar look less than thrilled. 

I don’t hang around to see if he dies, though, as I’ve got to get to Lewisham. It’s about 40 minutes, a journey that takes in a huge downpour, a very busy bus up Borough High Street, a train to Ladywell, and a five-minute saunter that takes me past Carpet Corner, probably my favourite of London’s corners (up your game, Hyde Park).

Inside the Fox and Firkin, it’s about as busy as the Duke of York. There’s a stocky fellow at the bar taking possession of a massive glass of white wine (I estimate 250ml), a shame given that this is the last Firkin that actually makes its own beer. I order Ladywell Pale (keg, £6.90), which is punchy and full of flavour. It’s very expensive, but it’s genuinely nice. There’s no cask here either.

This place is massive. There’s a big picture of Jimi Hendrix, but it’s the other decoration that takes my fancy, including a few bits that date back to when it was part of the original Firkin chain (the current pub and brewery has no connection to Bruce’s chain, except that it has inherited the name). There’s a newspaper rack, entitled “Firkin Newspapers” (there are no newspapers in it). There’s a wooden sign reading “Follow the Firkin Trail and see the breweries of yesteryear.” And there’s a partially obscured sign apparently advertising takeaway Dogbolter, featuring the classic pissed-up bulldog branding. 

I decide to wander out the back. I’ve been here before, but each time I visit I’m amazed by the size of the pub garden. It’s huge. There’s a big stage down one end, a railway carriage, and huge amounts of covered space. If you want to smoke in a pub, come here. As long as it’s not too chilly, you’re golden.

The wine drinker and his pal are in the garden, smoking, but there’s no risk of secondary smoke - this place is so big, I’d have to bellow even to attract their attention! There’s a charmingly disheveled feel to the place; it’s atmospheric, despite the lack of punters. 

You could almost imagine yourself back in the 1990s, in fact, what with the questionable murals, adverts for dance-music events and smoking. Even the glasses, emblazoned with the legend, “For Fox Sake Buy Me A Firkin Pint”, are a throwback. All it needs is someone from Stoke for me to be rude to. 

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading! 

A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by Will Hawkes

Enjoy London Beer City? Support it here 

England Expects

Oli Carter-Esdale, landlord of Wimbledon’s Trafalgar Ale House, is extremely proud of his handpumps. “That’s my pride and joy,” he says, pulling back on the right-most of five pumps on the main bar, so I can see that it was made by Birmingham company Gaskell & Chambers in 1940. 

“We used to have one handpump that was original, from when the pub was a beer house in the 19th century. It had a secret spirit measure in it - they weren’t licensed to sell anything stronger than beer - but [the pump] finally snapped recently.”

That old pump might have given up the ghost, but the Trafalgar is clearly not planning to follow suit. Reopened in 2023, it has faced repeated attempts by owners Adenbuild Construction Limited to redevelop the pub site - and this week Oli discovered that Adenbuild has appealed to the Secretary of State over rejected plans to demolish the building and replace it with a four-storey block.

These plans included the replacement of the pub with a new, smaller venue - but anyone in the pub business has heard this sort of thing all before. Redeveloped ‘pubs’ are frequently completely unfit for purpose. (Even apparently minor changes - like the conversion of upper floors into flats - can  be fatal: take a look at the White Hart in New Cross, shut since the landlord got planning permission to turn the upstairs into flats. It’s currently on the market for £60,000 with a free-of-tie lease.)

Luckily, Oli - who grew up nearby and has worked in hospitality in London and Bristol for more than a dozen years - has no plans to lay down and die. “We’re waging a campaign,” he says. “We’ve had councillors sending around emails telling people how they can make a comment on the application, because it’s now out of their hands. 

“We’ve got a couple of people in the pub who are lawyers, one of whom has drafted - if it comes to it - a judicial appeal. We’ve got five weeks [from the 24th July] to make representations - and then, apparently, there’s a 29-week delay at the inspectorate down in Bristol, which will really drag things out.”

How the inspectorate will come to a decision is not clear, but you’d hope they’d visit the area. This part of Wimbledon feels a long way from the famous tennis club; it’s a mish-mash of council-owned housing and new flats, with various other structures - a school just across High Path, for example, or a car wash a little further up the road. Nearby is the Nelson Arms - a pub whose exterior beauty is only matched by the bleakness inside - and, a little further away, The Sultan, an excellent pub run by Hop Back Brewery.

Unlike the Nelson, The Trafalgar is not, in all honesty, London’s prettiest pub. It’s a squat little place, with a cellar squeezed in under the floor at one end of the building and toilets with questionable plumbing (“Every three or four weeks, I’m in there with a rod and hose,” Oli says, leaving just enough to the imagination).

But what it lacks in physical beauty it makes up for in the evident connection it has with local people. “When we first got the keys [back in 2023] I had people coming up to me in the street, delighted and amazed, saying, ‘Are you sure? Are you actually doing this?’” says Oli.

“The pub is tied to the community. There's a man called Keith who’s been coming in for 57 years, a guy called Lance who’s been drinking here since he was 21. My Dad brought me in here when I was 21. The community goodwill has been enormous. When the first planning permission went in, 400 people objected.”

Others should care, too. The Trafalgar serves some of the best cask ale in London; last Saturday, I enjoyed a genuinely superb pint of Surrey Hills Shere Drop. No wonder 60 percent of this wet-led pub’s takings are cask ale, even at the height of summer. 

You could understand, though, why Oli might want to give up, notwithstanding the impact on his four staff members. He also runs the Hand and Marigold in Bermondsey, a superb little pub, and the psychological impact of constantly battling to survive must take its toll. “It’s tough,” he says. “Often the only thing people want to talk about when they come to the bar is, what’s happening? What’s going to happen next? It’s relentlessly stressful.”

The pub’s three-year agreement, signed in 2023, has one year left to run, after which it becomes a rolling payment. “Back in 2023, everyone thought this pub was going to be closed forever, everyone thought it was lost,” says Oli. “And having revived it, and rejuvenated it, and put so much of myself into the pub - including most of the decorations - I’m not going to give up now.” All hands to the pump. 

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Manet Mix

A delightful and rare confluence of beer and art is on show at the National Gallery at the moment. Two paintings by Manet - At the café and Corner of a Café-Concert - which originated as one before the artist cut them in half, have been reunited at the National Gallery in London (the former is owned by the Oskar Reinhart Collection 'Am Römerholz’ in Winterthur, Switzerland). The pictures, created in 1874, depict a scene at the Brasserie Reichshoffen in Montmartre, Paris and will be together in London until December.

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Fan Flick

A pub in North London has produced a film about itself. Here Comes A Regular - a "quirky, warm and soulful short" co-written by The Boogaloo's landlord Gerry O'Boyle - is acted out by staff and customers. "I wanted to make a film about the beauty of pubs, about how they are important for the mental, spiritual and physical health of the customers,” O’Boyle told the Ham and High.

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 Hoop and Horse

Two historic London pubs are currently being restored prior to being reopened. Farringdon’s Hoop and Grapes - which first opened in 1832 - has been shut since the end of 2020, but owners Shepherd Neame have announced it will reopen next year. An extensive “multi-million pound” renovation is expected to begin in the autumn, with the hope that it can reopen in the spring. 

“It needs doing top to bottom,” says Sheps’ operations manager Ryan Torrie. “[We’re going to make it] a really brilliant, premium traditional pub. It’s going to look great.” Sheps is currently ploughing money into its central London estate: The Westminster Arms, reopened in March, gives a reasonable idea of how the Hoop and Grapes will look.

Then there’s the Running Horse in Mayfair, which closed in 2023 and which apparently dates back to 1738. It’s currently being restored as part of a development next to Bond Street tube. More info when I have it. 

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Stag Party

The Stag Brewery at Mortlake - once home to Watney and most recently a Budweiser plant - has finally been approved for redevelopment. Most of the former brewery will be demolished, with the exception of the Maltings and the façade of the bottling plant and former hotel. The brewery closed in December 2015. Not everyone is happy.

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40ft High

Dalston brewery 40ft is rapidly becoming London’s most upwardly mobile beer-maker. Having recently taken on German Kraft’s former bar at the Staycity Hotel in Dalston, the brewery - founded by four pals in 2015, but now run entirely by Irishman Steve Ryan - opens a new venue, 40ft Blackhorse Road, tonight (Friday 8th) in Walthamstow. “You meet your partner here [in Dalston], have your first dates, do your thing, get married, move to Walthamstow, and then bring your kids to that tap room,” Ryan told The Times.

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Cellar Watch

I spent part of Monday afternoon at the Coach and Horses in Greek Street, filming a little clip that may or may not see the light of day. Whilst there, I managed to inveigle myself into the cellar - and here’s the proof. What a beauty! 

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Temple Of Gloom

The Temple Brew House - sometimes described as London’s most central brewery - has closed. Owners Young’s have decided to rearrange things on Essex Street: Davy’s Wine Bar will take over the entirety of the ground floor, with a new ‘Beer Hall’ occupying the lower-ground space. Given that on-site brewing isn’t mentioned in the social media stuff, I suspect that’s the end of that.

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Two pubs, One City: Duck and Rice, Soho; Stranded, The Strand

What, you might wonder, has been my most profound impact on the wide world of London hospitality? Firstly, thanks for asking. Secondly, it was probably when I provided the name for a Czech beer bar that opened in Clerkenwell in 2021. Pivo. The founders wanted to call it ‘Czech Pub’ or ‘Real Beer From Bohemia’ or something similar - and my much snappier suggestion (the Czech word for beer, language fans) was happily accepted.

Not that it helped. Pivo shut about three weeks after opening, for which I must take some of the blame. Who knows, maybe ‘Real Beer From Bohemia’ would still be going today? Probably not. The truth is that real Czech lager (i.e. not the stuff brewed in Burton) has largely struggled to establish itself on the London market.

Take a look at Pilsner Urquell’s tank beer. A decade ago, it squatted like a giant toad across London’s hospitality scene. Tankovnas were everywhere, from the Sloaney Pony to the Draft House (remember them?) on Seething Lane. Now there’s just one left, at the Duck and Rice in Soho. According to my spies in Pilsen, owners Asahi have lost interest in promoting PU, preferring to focus on Peroni. At the recent National Geographic Traveller Food Festival, Pilsen’s stall was serving (admittedly delicious) beer from a microbrewery rather than the beer that made the city famous.

It’s a rum do, but happily there are still people prepared to try and sell the good stuff to ungrateful Londoners. Stranded, the latest opening from Bloomsbury Leisure Group, focuses on Budvar in its various forms and opened on the Strand earlier this summer. It’s not far from the Duck and Rice - so I thought ‘two pivos, one stone’, so to speak. Maybe I could get to the bottom of the issue.  

It was Saturday afternoon and Soho was absolutely alive. The Nellie Dean has dozens of customers necking pints outside, and the Blue Posts on Broadwick Street was if anything even busier. Down on Frith Street, Ronnie Scott’s was throwing a street party and the atmosphere was near-manic. Everywhere there were people wearing Oasis gear (the Peroni of rock bands lol lol lol, only teasing. Seriously, though, those lads must be making a killing). 

At the Duck and Rice, meanwhile, lunch service was winding to a close. I had 15 minutes to choose some grub before the kitchen closed, the waitress told me, which is exactly the sort of challenge I embrace. Crispy duck roll, Char sui cheung fun, Steamed har gui prawn. Bosh, as I believe the kids say. 

And to wash it down, a glass of tank PU (£8.50). The PU here is served in a frosted glass, which a lot of people don’t like but it has the benefit of toning down what - even for PU - was an unusually potent dose of butterscotch. This is not a novel observation, but it’s such an odd beer: very bitter, but otherwise it doesn’t taste like a Pilsner, despite being the original. I used to love it, but on this occasion I struggled - perhaps because I’ve recently been in North Germany, where the pale lagers are crisp, bitter and very, very clean.

I wasn’t the only person struggling. The couple seated next to me barely exchanged a word, although they didn’t look particularly upset. Bored, if anything. On the other side, a group of South African pals were, by comparison, having a wild old time. “You got shook up like a soda can!” one remarked, to widespread amusement, apropos of an anecdote that I failed to hear. 

The food is decent, the beer is fine, the decor - including four PU tanks at the entrance, installed way back in 2015 - is quite nice (even if I am seated with my back to the room, perhaps as a punishment for having arrived for lunch so late). I do have one complaint, though. The music is awful, the sort of cheesy house that was a key feature of “It’s A Scream” pubs back in the 1990s.

Things, happily, are much quieter on The Strand, and even more so inside Stranded (“Home of the Perfect Pour”). This is a big place, authentically Czech in its combination of comfort and slightly awkward liminality, and although there’s a regular stream of customers it never gets close to being busy. A plus, you might say, although if I was the owner I’d want to squeeze every last drinker in. 

But what of the beer, I hear you squeal impatiently? Well, there are four Budvar options, including Unfiltered (£5.50), which seems appropriate and is, at 4 percent ABV, a whole percentage point weaker than the normal Budvar. After a brief chat with the actually quite genial barman (“why’s it weaker?” “Sugars” “fermented out less?” “Yes”), I take a seat to enjoy my beer.

Budvar is a much cleaner beer than PU; it’s not very bitter, and is in some ways its more like a Bavarian Helles than a Czech Pilsner. The unfiltered version is a touch sweeter, inevitably, but still (by contrast with the PU) very crisp, and it goes down easily. 

The clientele on this unsettled Saturday afternoon are a mixture of people who have been watching the Lions rugby team and people who are going to the Oasis concert later. Maybe some are doing both! There’s a big group from Ulster, standing next to the pub’s impressive fibreglass pivo. A woman whoops with glee when she finds the accessible toilet. The tunes are classic British pop, from A Town Called Malice - a man in an Oasis t-shirt does a little dance - to Too Shy Shy. 

It’s a decent place, and the beer is great value. I can’t help feeling, though, that the Strand - and particularly this bit of the Strand - is an odd spot for a bar, and it doesn’t look particularly like a bar from the outside. 

And then there’s the name. Stranded? Lads, come on. ‘Real Beer From Bohemia’ is right there. 

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading!  

A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by Will Hawkes

Enjoy London Beer City? Support it here 

On the Buses

Stephen O’Connor, co-owner of the Green Goddess beer cafe and microbrewery in Blackheath, chuckles down the line as he discusses the significant intersection of beer and bus enthusiasm. “There should be a Venn Diagram of people who are into buses, people who are into beer, and people who turn up to events like the one we’re running this Saturday,” says Stephen, who runs the Green Goddess with wife Maryann. “Plenty of people right in the middle.”

The event in question - Shirk, Rust And Pray - takes in three of South-east London’s best modern beer venues (The Green Goddess, The Rusty Bucket in Eltham and The Shirker’s Rest in New Cross) and an open-top double decker bus (DMS2127, bus fans, seen here at another engagement), which will ferry happy punters between the venues for much of Saturday.

And Stephen will be the driver. How does it feel, I wonder, to be amongst so many high-spirited (drunk) people but not able to drink yourself? Is it frustrating? “It is and it isn’t,” he says. “I was so happy [during the first event last year]. Every picture of me from the day I have a big smile on my face.” 

But isn’t it stressful driving a bus in London, anyway? “Well technically driving a bus is no harder than driving a car,” Stephen says, which may be true but I remain to be convinced. “The ones I drive are 30, 40, 50 years old, so they do tend to be a bit more challenging. But because you’re that bit higher, you can see what’s going on.”

As already noted, there’s a significant overlap between beer and travel appreciation, but buses and pubs have a complementary relationship in other ways too. It’s a rare London bus route that doesn’t have at least one stop named after a pub (The Green Goddess is right by the Royal Standard stop, while for the Shirkers’ you’ll need to get off at the Marquis of Granby), and they’re very handy for getting from pub to pub, too, even if you haven’t legally been able to drink on Transport for London’s network since 2008.

Maryann and Stephen actually met while working for TfL. That’s where he got his bus license (although he didn’t work as a driver). He drives buses as a side gig, for weddings and other events, which is how he’s able to secure the bus free-of-charge for Saturday’s event. Driving drinkers around for Shirk, Rest and Pray is more fun than the wedding work, he says.

“Everybody just enjoys themselves,” he says. “It’s an uncomplicated bit of fun. If you’re driving people to a wedding, then sometimes they’re happy and sometimes they’re not. You’ve got to be there at a certain time, sometimes it’s down a street that’s not practical for a double-decker. 

“With this, I feel like I’m among friends.  We have a timetable but that’s more to focus people’s minds … it’s hugely rewarding.”

The idea came from a bus trip laid on by Lost and Grounded to Bristol for London bar owners. Stu Gyles, owner of the Rusty Bucket, suggested they could do something similar in South-east London. “And I said, ‘Oh I can get hold of a bus. We can make that work.’” This year, there are three special beers available on Saturday: Shirk, a pale ale brewed by Three Acre Brewery, Rust, a hazy pale brewed by Villages Brewery and Pray, a witbier brewed by Green Goddess at Merakai Brewing.

The event was popular in 2024, and a reasonable weather forecast for Saturday will surely bring out the beer n’ bus crowd once again in their droves. Might they need a second bus next year? “It’s probably do-able, but we’d have to look at the extra cost. I’m sure we’ll eventually end up going there, but let's see how we get on this year, when we’re a bit more organised and a bit more pragmatic.”

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Craft Across The River

The London Craft Beer Festival returns this weekend, with two key differences. It’s taking place in mid-July rather than August, and the venue has changed from Tobacco Dock to Magazine in North Greenwich. “We sold out Tobacco Dock [for the] Saturday [sessions] two years running,” says Greg Wells, MD of organisers We Are Beer. “It was time to expand - and the new space is epic.”

And the date change? “Summer holidays are a tough time for industry heads to come down, especially buyers for our trade element,” he adds. “But also attendees with children - when it’s the summer holidays, you’ve got to juggle childcare.”

In terms of what attendees can expect, there are more breweries than ever before, including a return for Sierra Nevada. “I’m very excited about that,” says Greg. And, he didn’t add, there’s a reasonable quality crazy golf course just a few yards from the venue for afters, too. 

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Paint It Black

One of We Are Beer’s flagship elements is its annual Top 50 beers list, which polls “industry experts, trade buyers and drinkers”. This year’s winner is a London beer: Anspach and Hobday’s London Black. The victory is a reflection not only of the beer’s undoubted quality, but also, surely, the current popularity of nitro stout. The list itself is pretty interesting, taking in everything from Landlord (No 2) to Jubel Peach (No 15).

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Que-back

The City of Quebec, which may or may not be the oldest gay venue in the country, has been refurbished and reopened by Greene King. An unspecified six-figure sum has been spent, according to Greene King, on a variety of upgrades, including the installation of a projector screen, effects lighting and a new DJ booth on the ground-floor stage.

The venue has been a cornerstone of the LGBTQIA+ community since its establishment in 1946, according to Greene King. It was originally frequented by RAF pilots following the venue’s opening after World War II.

“We are celebrating the pub’s relaunch in style with a wide range of exciting promotions and events throughout the summer, kicking off with cabaret hosted by Dolly Diamond and karaoke with Tania LeCoq on our opening day,” says general manager Darren Dunn. 

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40 Golden Greats

I’ve spent most of this year researching a searchable pub tool for the Daily Telegraph, “The 500 Best Pubs in England”. 40 of them are in London; find out which ones here.

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Two Pubs, One City: Bird House Brewery, SE24; Gipsy Hill Brewery, SE27

As long-term subscribers to London Beer City will recall, I’m sure, I take my daughter to her gymnastics class one evening a week. Until recently, this class lasted a single hour, allowing just enough time for a leisurely pint at The Crown and Greyhound, a ravishing Victorian Dulwich boozer where you can always find a comfortable nook for a quiet pint and 30 minutes of high-quality doomscrolling.

Well, things have changed. My daughter’s passion for gymnastics means she now does two full hours a week. My horizons have correspondingly broadened. I’ve spread my wings, trying the fish-and-chips at much-hyped Ken’s Fish Bar in Herne Hill (batter good, fish decent but not spectacular, chips ok, service friendly), and pints at The Dulwich Woodhouse (unbelievably grumpy staff, expensive) and The Alleyn’s Head, a good-value option in West Dulwich with a slightly oppressive atmosphere.

Having got into the swing of this new reality, though, I soon found such piecemeal arrangements unsatisfactory. Ambition took over. It occurred to me that I could visit two of the local breweries and, blithely ignoring the considerable difference between taprooms and pubs, come up with some passable copy for this, the shallow end of my monthly newsletter.

Thus it was that, about 20 minutes after having dropped my daughter at her class one recent evening, I found myself ensconced in the bright and modern surroundings of the Bird House Brewery taproom. Set in a railway arch in Herne Hill occupied until relatively recently by Canopy Brewery, it feels like a cocktail bar as much as a beer place. There’s a pale-n-pine colour palette and a profusion of house plants, not to mention some sort of DJing arrangement down the far end of the bar.

I was naturally trepidatious, a mood intensified by the server’s complete disinterest in the most basic of human interactions - but the beer, a White IPA no less (£6), soon put my mind at rest. It was quite delicious, albeit with less of the citrussy spice that you might associate with the style (which is a blend of IPA and wheat beer; German-style wheat beer in this case, I’m guessing).

And then there were my fellow boozers. They were an amenable, if extremely bourgeois, bunch. A father was sitting with his very small and cute daughter. Two blokes sat in full sunshine, chatting about house prices. A couple came in and went to the bar: white IPA for him, white wine for her. Two young women arrived with two very fluffy dogs, and used the construction “Can I get” when ordering beer. A family took a table on the other side of the room, scoffing noodles from the next-door archway alongside a variety of drinks. 

The vibe, meanwhile, came from piped-in music that may or may not have something to do with the DJing arrangement. There was gentle funk, there was gentle reggae, there may even have been gentle speed metal. It was all very pleasant. As modern beer experiences go, it was a good if rather detached one.

A week later, I headed the other way, southwards towards the Gipsy Hill taproom, having dropped off my mini-Simone Biles. Gipsy Hill has one immediate difference with the Bird House set-up, in that brewing obviously takes place here. Once upon a time Gipsy Hill shared this industrial estate with London Beer Factory, but the latter departed to Norfolk in 2022 and Gipsy Hill basically runs the place now, give or take a few units for a company called Liv’s Kitchen.  

Everyone else was sitting outside in the sun - but that’s not for the pasty likes of me, so I took a seat at one of the long tables in the interior, having purchased a pint of Hepcat (£6.50). There’s a lot more going on at this taproom, decoratively-speaking, than at Birdhouse: barrels, a mini brewkit, some extremely jaunty art, a random pair of easy chairs. By contrast, there’s not a great deal of beer on the bar these days, but keg Hepcat is tasting good even if, I have to say, it’s a bit better on cask.

Everything was going smoothly. Too smoothly. At about 6.45pm, about halfway down my pint, 30 athletic and (mostly) young people started entering the taproom and dropping stuff off on tables at the far end. There followed about 10 minutes of milling around - loud running chat, hands on hips - before they headed off, presumably for a long and invigorating run (“We’re going to go now” “Alright”).

They seem nice enough, and presumably they all had a pint later (I was gone by then) but I do wonder about this modern trend of breweries promoting exercise. The problem with running (and related activities) is that eventually you realise that drinking beer eradicates all your ‘good work’. Then you have to decide to give up either running or beer - and, incredibly, some people pick the latter.

A chilling thought - so I washed it away with a pint of London Black, a beer brewed by a different South London brewery, before a gentle stroll back to pick up my daughter. She was red in the face after doing too much jumping and leaping and cartwheeling; I, by contrast, was cool as a cucumber. Beer 1, Exercise 0.

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading!     

A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by Will Hawkes

Enjoy London Beer City? Support it here 

Rock and a Hard Place

Less than 200 feet from the front door of Rock Leopard Brewing Co’s home in Thamesmead, South East London, is the neighbourhood’s most famous physical feature. It’s South Mere, an artificial lake - or, as Anthony Burgess had it in his 1962 book, A Clockwork Orange, "Flatblock Marina". When Stanley Kubrick turned the book into a film in 1971, this was the backdrop to one of the key scenes, with chief Droog Alex asserting his dominance with a bit of the old ultraviolence.

On a warm day this week, Droogs are in short supply. Actually, Thamesmead - or at least, the part close to the lake’s southern tip, where you’ll find Rock Leopard - is looking pretty good. As someone who cut their teeth on a local newspaper, and for whom Thamesmead was a byword for urban decay and general grimness, it’s a surprise. Thamesmead is clearly not what it was. The arrival of the Elizabeth Line in nearby Abbey Wood - a 10-minute walk - makes this perhaps the best connected neighbourhood in Zone 4. You can be in Canary Wharf in 15 minutes.

It’s been a long time coming. Stacey Ayeh, the man behind Rock Leopard, was brought up in North London but was lured south 23 years ago by talk of how things were going to change. “I was sold a dream,” he says with a wry smile. “I saw an advert in a newspaper, it said - ‘come to Thamesmead, it’s an up-and-coming area!’ 23 years on, here we are.”

There have been plenty of roadblocks where Rock Leopard is concerned. Founded in 2017 by Stacey, an industry veteran and former importer with Koppaberg and Nils Oscar on his CV, Rock Leopard has lacked a home until now, but not for lack of effort. He has spent three years trying to secure a unit in Cygnet Square, a period characterised by frustrating encounters with planning officers, licensing officials and building control. At one point, he was gazumped by Starbucks; overall, £43,000 has been spent. 

“It’s been madness,” he says. “It’s been a crazy process.”

But now Rock Leopard has a base, and a good one, too - right on the square, the new heart of Thamesmead. For the last few weeks, the bar has been open at weekends, a boon for locals who had begun to believe the brewery was a figment of estate agents’ imaginations.  “When we first opened, someone said they thought we were an urban myth,” he says. “‘Has anyone seen this brewery, has anyone tasted the beer?!’”

The unit is largely bare now, but on the floor are laid out plans of how it will look when it’s completed. The brewing equipment along one wall, fermenters nearby; lots of tables; food, including pizza and pop-up options (the first openings have seen Jollof rice and salt-beef bagels on offer). Stacey has permission for drinkers to sit outside until 9pm every evening, a huge boon since that covers a large space.

And then there’s the beer, which is currently contract-brewed at Drop Project, across South London in Mitcham. There’ll be a variety of options when the bar is fully up and running, although Rock Leopard is undeniably best known for hoppy modern beers. “I think my beers are great,” Stacey says. “They’re on a level with other products that are out there.”     

There’s still a long way to go, more hoops to jump through. Stacey sees the unit being fully operational “by next Christmas”. It’s not an easy time for London breweries - plenty have closed in the last 12 months or so - but he feels a brewpub will give him a fighting chance. They're the best model for small craft brewers, he insists. 

Inherent to that is bringing new people in, he adds. “The other week, [in the brewery] there was a headteacher talking to an aerospace engineer, talking to someone who installs fibre optic cables, talking to someone who works for a gas supply company. They all live within 300 metres of here, but they wouldn’t have met without this place. That’s what we want to do.” 

And no-one else seems to have twigged about Thamesmead. “From where we are, there’s probably an eight-mile radius before you get to the next craft brewery,” he says. “It took a long time for the Elizabeth Line to arrive, but it’s arrived now, and it’s a game-changer. It’s phenomenal.”

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Stout Fellow

London beer has lost two titans in the last few weeks. Firstly there was Martyn Cornell, historian and writer, whose fierce intellect and congenial style will be much missed. He took the lead in exploring London’s beer history, exploding much-cherished myths and establishing a far clearer understanding of how styles like Porter emerged and evolved - and in the process, shining light on the history of London itself. He could be brusque in print, but in person he was always genial and interested in others. 

And then there’s Ken Don, Youngs’ final head brewer and a passionate supporter of both Maris Otter malt and cask ale. Roger Protz has written his obit for the Guardian.

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Citizen Clem

What’s in a name? In Limehouse, perhaps, signs of a subtle cultural shift. The Craft Beer Co, one of the key drivers of London’s craft beer culture a decade back, had decided to rename its E14 pub the Clement Attlee, celebrating the Labour Prime Minister who was Limehouse MP between 1922 and 1950 (when the constituency was abolished). 

Why, though? “I love the name and I think it's very fitting that Limehouse' greatest son has a pub celebrating him,” Craft Beer Co founder and owner Martin Hayes tells me via email. “There was one in Fulham [near the housing estate of the same name] but that was demolished long ago.”

If you, like me, detect a subtle shift towards a more traditional pub naming model, you might be right, although Hayes rejects the notion that his pubs are following a trend towards “geezer-core” (“I am not sure I buy into all that jazz”). The group’s last opening, The Bear in Paddington, was also more traditionally named - but Craft Beer Co pubs have always looked fairly traditional, with brewery mirrors, handpumps, and comfortable bench seating.

And what about the others? “There are no active plans to rename any of the other pubs, but I wouldn't rule it out,” he says. “Lots of people know The Craft Beer Co and its been very good for us, we are proud of it, but perhaps combining it with great pub names will be the way we go in the future,” he says. 

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Step Up

The Walsh family, which runs Putney’s marvellous Bricklayers, has taken on a pub in East London: The Peacock in Stepney. I haven’t been, yet, but based on what they’ve achieved in Putney this should be worth visiting. 

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McWins

Much-cherished King’s Cross pub McGlynn’s, which has been closed since landlord Gerry Dolan died in 2023, has been sold - and according to estate agents Sidney Phillips, it will remain a pub. “The new owner intends to keep the traditional style that patrons have enjoyed for many years, even down to the name, retaining the family legacy after 40 years of ownership,” they say.

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Kraft Beer

This week I wrote about German Kraft, the brewery established in a food market at Elephant and Castle in 2017, for Pellicle. The model is currently being rolled out across Europe - meaning a London brewery is selling lager back to the Germans. 

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Two Pubs, One City

Brewdog Bar, Compton Stand, Lord’s; Bowlers’ Bar, Pavilion, Lord’s

“I call it Wingnut now,” chuckles an Australian in the row behind me at Lord’s Cricket Ground. I’m not sure this is what Brewdog intended when they called their bland-ish pale ale Wingman, but it’s hard to know what they intend these days. The company changes direction every six weeks. 

Last November, for example, when I came to the announcement of the Scottish brewery’s deal with Lord’s, James Arrow was CEO. He was the smooth corporate face of a company that had turned its back on the wild days of youth. Now he’s gone, in March, nine months after arriving. Then, a few weeks’ ago, there was a rebrand, designed to signify a “new era”. Key people seem to be leaving all the time. If you were a cynical person, you might conclude Brewdog was in trouble. 

Not that anyone at Lord’s cares about that. It’s the first day of the ICC World Test Championship, cricket’s latest ruse to inject competitive meaning into a sport which is better off without it. The game is terribly modern now, don’t you know - you can even get craft beer.

And there’s no reason why you wouldn’t. A cricket ground during a Test cricket, as anyone who’s experienced it knows, is the biggest pub in town. It’s Bacchanalian, like when Ian Nairn went to Oktoberfest. While I, a sophisticate who understands the value of self-denial, refuse to take a drink until 12pm, others are already laying into it at 10.30am, pretty much as soon as they arrive at the ground. Imagine Heathrow Spoons at 5am, but with cricket. 

And Lord’s, despite its haughty reputation, is as bad as anywhere else - perhaps worse because (in contrast to every other cricket ground in the world) you can still take a bottle of wine in. 

There’s plenty for sale inside, too, although what you can get depends on where you’re sitting. When Arrow announced the Lord’s deal, he added there would be cask ale, but only for the members. There’s certainly none at the bar in the Upper Compton, which has Wingnut - sorry, Wingman - and Cold Beer, a low-ABV lager. I suspect if there is cask ale, it’s available in the pavilion, where you’ll find the Bowlers Bar. Here MCC members can watch the cricket while necking the booze of their choice. 

I would go and check, but alas they won’t let me in, for two main reasons. One, I’m an iconoclastic rebel who refuses to tow the corporate line and (I very much suspect) they’re worried my revolutionary rhetoric would be too much for the MCC squares; and two, I’m not a member, and only members are allowed in. 

Anyway, I prefer it here with the plebs - or, as they call them at Lord’s, those who went to minor public schools. This is definitely a craft-beer crowd. In the row behind me, Mr Wingnut and his Pommie pal are discussing craft beer, and specifically Wingman.

Too fruity for me, says the Pom. 

I’ve had five, says the Aussie. 

I live near Gipsy Hill, says the Englishman. Nice beer. They’re owned by something bigger now, but I think you have to be. Still brewed locally.

A lot of breweries going out of business in Australia, says the Aussie. 

I’m sure it’s the same here, says the Englishman. We’re big craft-beer fans, he adds, apropos of nothing.

It’s friendly stuff, probably because it’s South Africa playing Australia and not England. Actually, most of the crowd is South African, who turn out to be much meeker then you might expect. All the gobshites are Aussies, including one bloke right at the back who keeps referring to Steve Smith as “Tha Kinga Lordzz”, blurting out “Webstaaa” and finally shouting something so incomprehensible that an Aussie in the row in front asks, “What did he just say?”

Lord’s often had a diverse crowd - due to cricket’s popularity in the sub-continent and Caribbean - but it's pretty white today. The contrast with the young, mostly black staff at the Compton Stand bar is unmissable.

All the beer is served in hard plastic glasses, for which you pay a £1 deposit. Beer is pre-poured, meaning there’s no foam and most glasses are not full - Stockport CAMRA would have a fit, but no-one here seems to care, even if it costs £7.50 a go. The punters only get upset when they get the wrong beer (“Is this an IPA? I ordered an IPA”) or when the bar closes suddenly at 5.30pm, with half an hour of cricket still to play. 

One be-mulleted Aussie arrives at the bar at 5.35pm, to be told there is no beer. “What about the beer in the fridge?” There isn’t any, he’s told by a fellow in an ill-fitting suit, even though there obviously is. He gets over it quite quickly; the last I see, he’s instigated a group hug with the bar staff. 

I very much doubt they’ve stopped serving in the pavilion, though. In fact I can see them still drinking, using my binoculars (crucial for a day at the cricket). Absolutely sickening. If only there were some iconoclastic rulebreakers around who might stand up against this sort of inequality, but they’re in short supply at Lord’s. 

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading!  

A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by
Will Hawkes

If you enjoy London Beer City, please forward it to your friends. 

If you really like it, support it here 

Pony Sloaney?

A middle-aged Australian man is standing at the bar at the White Horse in Parsons Green. “Is Asahi available?” No, it’s not. “Can I just have a lager? I want a beer-tasting beer.” He pauses. “Nothing too fruity.”

In the end he gets a Camden Hells, which seems to pass muster. My own first choice - Track Sonoma - is also unavailable, so I have a pint of Vocation’s Chop And Change. Along the bar, quite a few beers seem to be “Coming Soon”, while two of the five handpumps are dispensing Harvey’s Sussex Best, a long-term staple here, but typically only served on one pump, even when there were eight of them.

It’s the day after Bank Holiday Monday, so - in of itself - these are not serious problems. Beers run out, demand ebbs and flows, cask ale is on the run at many London pubs. But The White Horse, once regarded as the pub for beer in London, is not like other pubs - or, at least, it didn’t used to be.

Maybe now it is. London’s beer cognoscenti seem to think so. In May last year, for example, Beer Guide London’s Steve Jackson - who visits more London pubs each year then pretty much anyone, I’d guess - took it off his recommended list. “Beer list no longer merits entry,” the website reports.

If true, this would represent quite a fall from grace for this famous Fulham boozer. So what’s happened? 

Let's start at the beginning. The White Horse’s glory days began in the early 1980s, when Sally Cruikshank took over the pub. She employed Mark Dorber, a pHd student with a passion for beer, to look after the cellar. The pub was owned by Bass Charrington, one of British brewing’s ‘Big Six’ (it’s still owned by a descendant of that company, Mitchells & Butlers), so all the beer on the bar was BC - or it was supposed to be. Dorber, though, had other ideas. 

“I said to Sally, ‘Why don’t we have a bit of fun with this Christmas celebration [in 1981] and get some winter beers?’” Dorber, cellarman at The White Horse from 1981 and manager from 1995 until 2007, told me when I spoke to him for another article recently. “So a firkin of Marston’s Owd Rodger and a firkin of Theakston Old Peculier were procured and - to their credit - the Charrington boys looked the other way when this wonderful dark liquid came out of the Charrington IPA pump!”

At the time The White Horse was a fairly down-to-earth sort of place (Jeremy Clarkson, who drank there in the early 80s and who can’t, admittedly, be regarded as a perfect source, says it was “ a painter and decorator’s pub and everyone drank stout.”). Things gradually changed as, through the efforts of Cruikshank and Dorber, it became the de facto centre of London beer culture. 

This entailed education and events as well as serving good beer. In 1990 the pub hosted a seminar on Burton Pale Ales; a pale ale festival followed in 1992, an IPA event in 1993. Much of the groundwork for Britain’s modern beer culture was laid here. 

When I started writing about beer 15 years ago, The White Horse was known for putting on events that were a cut above those held elsewhere, a culture that remained even after Dorber headed for Suffolk in 2007. Food was often involved. Trips to the beautifully organised cellar were a must. At one event, we sipped Bass Ratcliff ale, brewed in 1869. Quite an experience, even if it didn't taste very nice.

My experience of the pub was not limited to beer events. For many years I had a season ticket at Craven Cottage; having got bored with the variability of Young’s in Putney, my friend Gavin and I switched our allegiance to the White Horse. It was often more fun than the football: the cask ale was invariably perfect, and there was always high-quality European and American beer on keg - and a fridgeful of Belgian beers, too. 

Anything interesting in British or continental beer quickly appeared on the bar here. Around 2014, for example, the White Horse became one of the first pubs in the UK to offer unpasteurised Pilsner Urquell, served from huge tanks attached to a wall. 

The pub served more prosaic beer, too. This wasn’t just a beer geek’s paradise. There were four lines located, as I recall, almost out of public view - like the pub was ashamed of them - including (if memory serves) Carling, Guinness and Strongbow. After one of Chelsea’s title-winning games in the noughties, I was once reliably informed, the pub added £1 to each pint of Carling to pay for the damage that would be caused by pints being thrown all over the shop.

Carling is, I think, gone now, replaced by upmarket rivals Peroni and Asahi, which sit alongside Guinness on the main keg T-Bar. One of the Pilsner Urquell tanks remains, but the pipe that leads to the bar has been disconnected, and the font removed. If you’re looking for a Continental lager now, it’ll have to be a Paulaner - a decent beer, no doubt, but not hugely thrilling. 

It’s the other beers on the bar, though, that really tell the story of what has changed. There are lots of ‘lifestyle’ products, drinks sold not on their tradition or provenance, but on their health or environmental benefits, or even their connection to famous people. There’s Prime Time, Lucky Saint, the hugely popular Jubel peach beer, Sxollie Cider and Clarkson’s own Hawkstone Lager. 

To be clear, these are not bad products; they’re just not the sort of thing that gets beer geeks hot under the collar. They are the drinks Fulham’s well-to-do drinkers want, and The White Horse is now engaged in a fierce battle for their custom. You’ll find many of these products on sale at the nearby Duke on the Green, run by Young's, which is setting the pace in West London.

And as this battle for West London’s posh pint pounds has hotted up, beer geeks have melted away. The truth is that beer people don’t travel to the White Horse in the way they once did. There are so many more London pubs offering wide ranges of high-class beer, from bitter brewed in Burton to superb Franconian lager to hazies by the dozen.

In that sense, this is a good news story: the world that the White Horse worked to bring into being is now here. It’s just a shame that Parsons Green’s legendary pub is not a part of it. 

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Billy Bounce

As the White Horse canters off into the sunset, another of London’s noted beer pubs has returned to the pack. The William IV played a key role in the early years of the city’s brewing renaissance, serving as home to Brodie’s from 2008 to 2018. 

Well now it’s back - from next month, anyway - as Walthamstow brewery Exale has taken it on. Sign up here to be in with a chance of getting your hands on 50 £50 bar tabs. 

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Hart Time

Posh pub people Public House are opening a fourth London pub, after The Pelican, The Hero and The Fat Badger, all in West London. The new pub will be called The Hart, and it’ll be on Blandford Street in Marylebone. What’s interesting about this site is it was previously home to The Flowerhouse, a pub whose mission was “to support women in the hospitality industry.” It was pretty unique, both in terms of ethos and design; according to their account, they wanted to continue in the site but were “massively outbid” when trying to arrange a new lease with the freeholder.

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Cottage High

Ye Olde Swiss Cottage, closed by owners Sam Smiths back in February, has been listed as an asset of community value, protecting it from demolition for five years. If it’s put on the market in that time, the local community will have six months to raise the money to buy it.

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Two Pubs, One City

Royal Standard of England; Land of Liberty, Peace and Plenty

Where exactly does London end? Squares will tell you it’s the edge of Greater London, and no further. Well, I think we’ve all had quite enough of squares - and anyway there are other, more imaginative ways of setting the bounds of the mighty metropolis.

Such as the Tube map. Look at it, and then look at the north-western corner. There’s a Zone 9. There’s a place called Amersham, which, when I was young and less interested in the thrilling intersection of public transport and geography, I imagined as the equivalent of Bromley or Orpington. It’s not! It’s miles out. It’s more like Maidstone.

Anyway,  I digress. The point here is that it’s on the tube map, and therefore a legitimate part of London, and therefore an acceptable topic for this section of the newsletter. It’s also close to two magnificently named pubs: The Royal Standard of England, and the Land of Liberty, Peace and Plenty. Case closed. In my opinion, this bit of Bucks/Herts/who cares is London - and opinions in modern Britain are sacrosanct, even when obviously dim.

(Also, full disclosure, I had to visit these pubs for an ongoing project - the ‘500 Best Pubs in England’ for the Telegraph, look out for it online in June, pub-lovers - so there’s that too). 

Ironically, given the public transport-based justification for this trip, it was soon clear there was going to be a lot of walking involved. From Beaconsfield station, it’s a mile-and-a-half to the Royal Standard (a distance that, as it turns out, was just an amuse bouche in terms of my daily step count).

What can we say for Beaconsfield? Well, it is a wealthy Buckinghamshire town; there’s an attractive centre, less attractive bits elsewhere, chi-chi shops and bland chains (Gail’s), pubs with history but not much soul. There’s also a public right of way that leads most of the way from the station to the Royal Standard, which evens the ledger somewhat. 

The highlight of this walk is a section right at the edge of town, where the path dips suddenly for about 50 metres, and then rises again in exactly the same way. At the top there was a horse, one of those shaggy ones who always look bored, who glanced at me as if to say “Good work me old china, you’ll have really earnt that pint”.

I couldn’t help agreeing, and by the time I reached The Royal Standard I was quite thirsty. Nonetheless, I had a quick look at the external fittings. It’s a handsome enough structure, although I’ve seen more impressive ‘Ye Olde” efforts. Perhaps the most interesting thing was the pub sign which claims this is 'the oldest freehouse in England’, one of those boasts that are almost certainly wrong.

Once inside, though, you can’t help but get carried away. I always think there are two possible approaches when you run a historic pub: ignore the history entirely, or ham it up to the Nth degree. The Royal Standard does the latter. This place is pure theatre, from the medieval dining-rooms vibes to the slightly rustically-accented bar gent, complete with felt hat, who served me a pint of Chiltern bitter (£8.45, including nuts). We even had some banter when I ask for some peanuts to accompany my pint. “Salted?” he asked. “Perfect,” I responded. “Well it is if you’ve got teeth,” he said, which is true, but given I have teeth not super-relevant.

Having inspected all the rooms, I took a seat in one at the front, which contained a roaring fire and two other customers: a man and his teenage son, who was eating chips. There was also the best bit of seating I’ve ever seen in a pub, a gently curved high-backed wooden bench. I didn’t sit in it because I wanted to look at it. 

The fire was roaring, a geezer was talking to the rustic bar man about how he used to come here before he moved to California, my pint was drinking pretty well, everything was pure gemutlichkeit.  Then something happened which I will try to describe in the plainest terms possible.

A disabled man was wheeled into the room by two young men, taking a spot between me and the fire. No problem there, I was warm enough - too warm, if anything! But then he asked who was paying, and when told by young man no 1 that it was young man no 2, he proceeded to chastise young man no 1, who responded with complete calm and patience. He continued to be mean, and the young man continued to gently brush it off.

I left soon after, for a lengthy hike across the Chilterns towards Amersham. It was, like many walks in the English countryside, both wonderful and petrifying in equal measure. First there were sun-dappled woods full of bluebells, gentle valleys, paths worn hard by boots in recent good weather, pheasants who ran away squawking when they saw me. Then there was an A-road just outside Amersham, BMWs and Audis racing past at 50mph, a blessedly early arriving bus. 

From Amersham I caught the tube to Chorleywood, and then there was another yomp, up a suburban hill to The Land of Liberty. After the Royal Standard, it was a bit of a letdown physically speaking, although the building itself is attractive enough. The font used on the facade is not appropriate for a pub, though (see below).

Inside, I ordered a pint (Black Hole Golden Ale, £5) and was asked if that’s all three times, each time more insistently. (Afterwards, I spotted a sign saying they prefer to be paid in cash because of the fee they have to pay the bank, or something. Oh well.)

There was a group of blokes talking the most ridiculous bollocks you can imagine, a pure distillation of pub chat. Sex, violence, golf - they covered all the main issues, incompetently. But in a Land of Liberty, we are all entitled to our opinions, no matter how ill-informed. 

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading! 

 A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by Will Hawkes

If you enjoy London Beer City, please forward it to your friends. 

If you really like it, support it here 

Trumped

AT ONE stage, you could write most London breweries’ origin stories without actually talking to them. ‘Visited the USA, drank craft beer, wanted to make similar beer in the UK’. Evin O’Riordain was the OG in this respect, but it became a well-worn line in the years between 2009 and 2016.

American influence - and, more specifically, American hop flavour - has fuelled London’s brewing renaissance over the past few decades. From Neck Oil to Pale Fire, London brewers have paraded their passion for (and understanding of) Obama-era American craft brewing. American Pale Ales on London bars have become legion. Wham bam thank you Uncle Sam.

The world, though, has changed. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to elect Donald Trump once might be regarded as misfortune; to do it twice is just fucking stupid. Trump’s introduction of tariffs, the bovine threats to Canada and Denmark, the increasingly aggressive way in which visitors to the USA are being treated: this points in one direction and one direction only. America acknowledges and wants no allies, and that includes Britain. MAGA is unleashed and obnoxious.

This is clearly about more than just beer (I don’t envy those faced with the prospect of disentangling Britain’s security apparatus from America’s, should that eventuality come to pass, to pick one example). But British brewing has been heavily influenced by the USA; so what happens if, all of a sudden, the US and American culture becomes deeply unfashionable? 

There are small signs already. One influential pal in the London beer world told me recently that “it’s hard not to be put off everything American.” People are already less interested in going to America. On the other hand, American craft-beer events remain popular - or, at least, as popular as these things ever are - and I saw an advert recently for a new company hoping to bring in fresh beer from the USA (very 2015). 

Plenty will argue that American brewers are not their government, any more than British brewers are Keir Starmer or Boris Johnson or whoever else ends up in 10 Downing Street. That’s certainly the Brewers Association’s view: Lotte Peplow, the BA’s tireless European ambassador, told me that, “boycotting beer from small, independent breweries is unlikely to sway decision-making in Washington DC.”

She also pointed out that the BA will be lobbying in DC around the subject of tariffs. “The Brewers Association is educating the new Congress and the administration about tariff impacts on small breweries, and talking to our supply chain partners about how tariffs would affect them and their customers,” she said.

And then there’s London brewers themselves. The amount of American-made craft-beer sold in the capital is relatively small, but there’s plenty of American-style beer, either specifically labelled American or made with US hops (& we haven't even got into how tariffs might affect their usage). Will perceptions of that change? Do consumers even think in these terms? Do people worry about the geopolitical implications of their pint?

I spoke to Pete Brown, Forest Road’s Bostonian founder, about this aspect, via email (he’s in Tokyo, or was). Does he think his beer is perceived as American? “I don’t think so at this point, maybe at the beginning when the brand was just me and my van and my dog,” he says. “I’m totally outnumbered now, and our flagship beer is our beloved all-British lager POSH.”

He feels that American craft-beer has “lost its footing” in London over the past 10 years, and that he “really hope(s) that Trump doesn't impact perception of USA craft beer negatively.”

He also points out that plenty of big brands, like Camden Town, have less obvious US links. The most likely brands to suffer a backlash would be the big boys, he says, because that’s what many Britons still regard as “American” beer. “I still find it commonplace with conversations with Brits in London - after telling them I work in beer - hearing "all you have is that sh*t Bud light right?", seemingly unaware of the amazing beers the USA has been producing for nearly 50 years now!”

Aficionados are unlikely to make the same mistake, and they’re the people who flock to the London Craft Beer Festival in the summer. One of the highlights of the festival is the showcase it offers for American craft beer, a showcase the BA is looking forward to putting on again this July. LCBF founder Greg Wells can see that Trump’s government might present problems for US brewers. 

“Beer can be a bit like football, can’t it?” he says. “People like to get behind the local team, and ‘local’ has been winning in beer here for a long time. I can imagine if I was an American brewer, it would make it uncomfortable coming over.”

But will British consumers want to drink it? “I think they will, they want American beer as part of their drinking repertoire,” he says. 

I suspect that’s true, and the BA stand will be thronged as ever come July - but the next few years are going to be interesting. For a long time many Britons have regarded Americans as only semi-foreign, because their products - from McDonalds to Apple Phones - are so much part of our lives, and we speak much the same language. This is a delusion that may not survive the next four years, and there will be implications in the London beer world as much as anywhere else.  

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License To Thrill

Perhaps the most important news of the year - at least as it applies to London hospitality - came last week, with the news that the government has decided to run a trial in London that will hand the Mayor much greater power over licensing.

This has the potential to revolutionise London nightlife. At the moment, licensing is controlled by London’s 32 boroughs, whose priority is (understandably) keeping the people who vote for them happy. Residents don’t want noise, which makes it harder for pubs, clubs and bars to negotiate longer opening hours or other fun things, like outdoor dining. 

The Mayor has other priorities. He wants to support London hospitality, particularly in its historic heartland, Soho. Westminster Council, which controls Soho, could be in for a nasty shock - or perhaps not. Watch this space.

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Hackney Shuts

Sad news from East London: Hackney Brewery has closed. Based on what the brewery has said, it appears to be the result of Covid-19 lockdowns and the subsequent unhelpful attitude of the local council, in this case Waltham Forest. 

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Blue For You

The Blue Eyed Maid in Borough High Street has reopened, as the Blue Maid. The name change is a reversion to a previous name, according to Dav Sahota, co-founder of UnBarred, the Brighton brewery that has revived the pub. 

The pub has a snazzy logo (mermaid, clad in a t-shirt, holding a pint) which is intended to reflect the history of the area. “It’s inspired by The Blue Maid in what used to be Blue Maid Alley/End in the 1500s, and the next alleyway off Borough High St, Mermaid Court where The Mermaid Inn (one of the coaching inns lost in time similar to The George) once stood,” says Dav. 

“The walls are a bit bare as the rest of our illustrations are coming!”

The pub’s reopening is great news for Borough, already one of the best places to drink in London. The Royal Oak, The Rake, The Gladstone, The Lord Clyde, The Ship, The Blue Maid, German Kraft nearby - that’s a great blend of pubs/bars offering different, complementary elements. 

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Masham, SE

Your intrepid correspondent was in North Yorkshire this week, visiting pubs for an ongoing project (which is why this newsletter is late; sorry). Whilst I was there, though, I had the chance to visit Masham, home of Theakston, Black Sheep, Brew By Numbers and Brick. The latter two’s beers have been produced at Black Sheep’s brewery for at least a year, despite packaging that makes a big deal out of their links to SE London.

Is there any sign of their existence in deepest North Yorkshire? Well, yes. I didn’t have time to take the tour, and the on-site bar is all Black Sheep beers, but the shop was selling Brew By Numbers/Brick beer (including Peckham Helles - bet that flies out) and a few bits of merchandise. A Brick Brewery hoodie, yours for £35; a BbyNo tote, a bargain at £4. 

This stuff was tucked away into a corner, but its interesting that its there at all. Is there much demand for it in sunny North Yorks? To be fair, finding and satisfying consumer demand doesn’t appear to have been Breal/the Keystone Brewing Group’s priority since it acquired the brands in 2023.

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Haus of Love

The Malt Haus, Pillars’ latest venue, has opened in Walthamstow. Formerly Wild Card’s Barrel Store, it's now billed as a beer and whiskey bar, and home to barrel aging and pilot brewing. It’s just a few doors down from the Pillars brewery.

Due to my commitments up North, I haven’t made it to Walthamstow yet - but given Pillars’ track record, I’d expect it to be well worth a visit. It’s closed on Monday and Tuesday, and there will be food residences, rotating every three months or so; check the instagram account for the latest news.

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Hop On-line

An interesting nugget from the excellent London Centric newsletter recently. Editor Jim Waterson has wheedled the proposed but rejected Overground names out of TfL, and they include Hops Line, which was (presumably) proposed for the Liberty line.

It was to be named in honour of William Coys, a 16th-century gardener. He worked at Stubbers Garden in Upminster, where (although this narrative is, inevitably, disputed) he grew the first tomatoes, Jerusalem artichokes and hops in the UK. 

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Amelia, Ils T’Aiment

The Park Brewery was among a large contingent of London brewers that enjoyed success at the recent SIBA awards in Liverpool. The awards are run and judged by independent brewers, and are - based on my conversations with brewers - considered the most significant in the industry.

Park won Gold in one of the most competitive categories, ‘Session Pale Ale,’ for its most popular beer, Amelia Pale. Josh Kearns, Founder of The Park Brewery, says, “We were overwhelmed by the win. We know Amelia is a popular beer locally, but winning the Nationals against such strong competition was beyond our expectations. It’s amazing.”

Wimbledon, Howling Hops, Pillars, Hammerton, Hackney Church and 40ft also carried off gongs, demonstrating the depth and quality of modern London brewing. The biggest winners of the night, though, were from Scotland. 

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Two Pubs, One City

Old Tiger’s Head, SE12; and New Tiger’s Head, SE12 (RIP)

Children say the darndest things, don’t they? I’ve always thought that, even when I was a child. A good example occurred recently, when my son and I were on the 122 bus to (his) cricket practice, passing through the neighbourhood of Lee Green.

Said neighborhood has two massive, pleasingly named Victorian pubs, almost facing each other: the Old Tiger’s Head and the New Tiger’s Head. The former has recently reopened, as we’d noted from the bus, and was impressively busy (the Six Nations was on and we saw, through the window, a man in a Wales shirt leaping up and down in joy, a rare sight this year lol). The latter, alas, shut in 2006 and sat unloved and boarded-up for more than a decade-and-a-half until it was converted into a shop.

Anyway, we were chatting away about the two pubs and I could see a look of faint incomprehension appear on my son’s face at the notion of the New Tiger’s Head, given it clearly wasn’t new. In fact, it was so old it had shut. ‘How new is the New Tiger’s Head?’ he asked.

I fudged it (‘late Victorian, a lot of pubs built then, ahem hem’) in a way that seemed to satisfy/be sufficiently boring to forestall further enquiry. It did make me think, though: wouldn’t this be a good opportunity to contrive a ‘Two Pubs’ out of a pub that is still a pub and another pub that isn’t?

Thus it is that, on the Sunday afternoon after that bus chat, I find myself back in Lee, staring at a beautiful tiled image of a tiger on the wall by the entrance to the Old Tiger's Head. The Tiger is looking to the left, but s/he seems to be eyeballing you, and her/his glistening tongue is lolling threateningly between razor-sharp incisors. S/He looks chill but ready to kill. 

It’s one of the nicest things I’ve seen in a pub recently, and presumably Victorian - unlikely anyone would be bothered to make something like this now, is it? The interior is less impressive, but welcoming nonetheless. Busy, too, I’m glad to note. I order a pint of St Austell’s reliable Tribute (good condition, £5.75) and look for a seat. There aren’t many, so the friendly barman offers to put another at the bar - but just in time I spot a small table in the corner. Phew. Almost had to chat to someone.

It’s a modern London pub scene. A young man is sharing a pot of tea with his father, waiting for meals to emerge. A dog is sleeping in the main thoroughfare. A variety of languages are being spoken. One wall has beautiful William Morris-style wallpaper on it. Lighting is dim, produced by steampunk-style bulbs hanging from the ceiling above the bar.

There are big TVs, too, but despite Scotland playing in the Six Nations, they are showing snowboarding. Wales may be rubbish, but at least someone cares! 

All in all, a positive experience. I leave with a spring in my step (by the other door so the ceramic tiger can’t discombobulate me again). 

Across the road, Blackheath Food Centre, which occupies the former New Tiger’s Head, glows with strip-lit possibility. It’s a handsome building, perhaps nicer externally than its former rival, with the sculpted head of a roaring tiger at the centre of the facade (the Old Tiger’s Head has one, too, but much less impressive). The pub sign, rather forlorn, remains.

Inside, it’s … actually a really nice shop. There’s an olive bar, a butcher's counter, hot eastern Mediterranean snacks, tempting fruit, interesting products of all kinds, including an impressive range of corner-shop beer options. There are almost certainly more ales available here now than there ever were when the pub was open.

Still, the best shop in the world is not as good as a pub. You can spend hours soaking up the atmosphere in a pub, but if you spend too long enjoying the vibe in a shop the staff start following you around, and asking if you need any help. Eventually, they make you leave. 

I relayed this acute observation to my son the next time we were passing. He looked at me a bit funny. We chatted about football.

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading! 

 A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by Will Hawkes

If you enjoy London Beer City, please forward it to your friends. 

If you really like it, support it here  

Happy Tribe

THE beer selection at The Crown and Greyhound in Dulwich is, for the most part, utterly predictable. The same four cask ales, served in varying conditions (Landlord, Sussex Best, London Pride, Doom Bar); Guinness; a wide range of lagers; and quasi-craft made by the likes of Beavertown (Heineken) and Brooklyn (Carlsberg).

There are occasional surprises, though. You’ll often find something from an independent London brewery - and from three independent London breweries, in particular: Forest Road, Signature and Two Tribes. The first two make sense: I’ve been to their breweries and they’ve clearly invested in equipment (Forest Road, for example, bought Russian River’s former brew kit back in 2020). 

The third, though, is a bit of a head scratcher. Two Tribes is based in Tileyard, a music-industry-focused co-working development north of King’s Cross, and its brewing equipment is modest. It’s never been a big, buzzy name (their instagram posts generally get about 20 likes). The branding is bright and energetic but not particularly memorable, and while the beers are good, they taste much as you’d expect them to.  

And yet this is one of London brewing’s undoubted success stories, its beer sold in Tesco, Waitrose and Ocado, at Mitchell and Butlers and Urban Pubs and Bars’ venues, at the National Theatre and Royal Festival Hall, and on Virgin Atlantic and Eurostar. How has this happened?

The story begins in 2015, when Niki and Justin Deighton - a former DJ turned entrepreneur - took on a brewery in Horsham, Sussex, adding the King’s Cross site in 2018. At that time, the stated ambition was to provide somewhere for Tileyard creatives to hang out. It was a £500,000 brewpub inspired by (although, notwithstanding an impressive sound system, not noticeably similar to) Warpigs in Copenhagen, and a music-themed brand, even producing beers for Island Records.

The brewery was run by two Justins, Deighton and (director of operations) Hutton; they recruited brewer Chris Tuominen a week before the 10-hectolitre brew kit, made by Zip in Hungary, arrived. His beers quickly proved popular, and initial modest ambitions were scaled up, with the Horsham site used to brew bigger batches to be sold to other venues.

The atmosphere in those early days was collaborative. Deighton (above) was in charge, but good ideas didn’t go unnoticed. Brewing and sales worked hand-in-hand; brands like Metroland, Dream Factory and Power Plant, still mainstays of the business, were born then. Deighton was very keen on sours - another Copenhagen influence, he once told me - and Tuominen produced the first iteration of New Romantic, a gose, with passion fruit. 

Perhaps the key moment in Two Tribes’ growth, though, had nothing to do with the beer. It came in November 2018, when Finance Director (and later managing director) Paul Robinson arrived from Meantime via a short stint at Love Lane brewery in Liverpool. He hired some of those who’d worked with him in the pre-Asahi Meantime days, most notably Mike Shuster in 2022. In turn, Shuster’s little black book of contacts opened the door to a spate of key deals, from supermarkets to Eurostar.

There was also an element of fortune, in that Two Tribes were advancing at a time when a number of independent London brands - for various reasons - were on the way out. Venues were looking for independent options - and Two Tribes offered good quality and competitive pricing. 

While the beer was soon selling fast, though, the company was in need of more cash. Investment came in 2023 from Hezi Yechiel, founder of bar company Urban Leisure Group, attracted to the company through his enjoyment of a Metro Land variation (‘Metro Land NYC’). Having invested, he took over, going through Two Tribes with a fine comb, cutting back on costs. It was a process that saw Deighton leave early last year.

If that was the end of what one former employee called Two Tribes Mk 1 (“The Music DNA had gone [after that]”), it’s clearly not the end for Two Tribes. Many of the staff that made it a success have moved on (Jess Ayres, regional sales manager, is the only original member of staff left; Dominic Lorberg is now head brewer, Tuominen having left in 2021) but the brewery, with a staff of around 30, is still upwardly mobile. This year they should make somewhere north of 16,000 hectolitres, around 15 percent of it on-site and the rest under contract.

The future seems full of possibility, although Two Tribes’ rise could also offer a clue as to how it might fall. That injection of Meantime experience proved crucial - but Paul Robinson is now chief commercial officer at upwardly-mobile Deya in Gloucestershire, having left Two Tribes in November. Where might he go hunting when he needs talent to help him sell more beer?

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Sekforde Saved

Good news from Islington. The Sekforde, which had been threatened with restrictive license conditions that (according to manager Harry Smith) would have resulted in the pub’s closure, has been saved. Islington Council, influenced by 1330 submissions in favour of the pub, threw out the proposed changes.

"It’s a weight off,” Smith says. “I spent the whole of the last three months thinking, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself’. I thought I’d have to get a new job and felt guilty that this pub has been going so long and we might have lost it while we were running it. 

“But we did feel we were in this unreasonable spot, so it’s also vindication.”

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Queer Gear

Leyton's Queer Brewing has acquired a brewkit. Having contract=brewed for years, the UK's first queer- and trans-owned brewery is now the proud owner of a refurbished 30hl brewhouse from Gravity Systems. They've also got an elegant (and witty) new logo...

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Fish Out Of Water

The latest London brewery to bite the dust is Beerblefish, where the taproom called last orders on May 8. It’s the second Walthamstow-based brewery to close in a matter of months, after Wild Card shuttered at the end of last year.

Meanwhile, Wild Card’s former Barrel Store has been taken on by lager specialists Pillars, whose brewery is just a few doors down. It’s now the Malt Haus, a community space and social hub offering independent beer and whiskey. More on that when I’ve had a look; it’s expected to be open in April.

Finally, Hackney Brewery is closing its Walthamstow taproom. The brewery blames Waltham Forest council, its landlord, for the closure.

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1984 Murder

Two men have been charged with murder in connection with the 1984 murder of Tony Littler. Littler was returning from a meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Beers from the Wood when he was attacked near his home in East Finchley in May 84.

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Anglesea End

A Woolwich pub which closed at the start of the year could be pulled down and replaced with flats. The Anglesea Arms, once owned by Kent brewery Shepherd Neame, is the subject of a planning application that envisages seven flats and a shop.

Shepherd Neame, meanwhile, is preparing to reopen the Westminster Arms having spent £1.2m doing it up. The pub, which is a hop, skip and a jump from the Houses of Parliament, is expected to open on St Patricks’ Day, Monday 17 March.

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Black Power

When does a fad become the new norm? I thought the post-Covid passion for nitro stouts (particularly Guinness) might subside at some point, as people moved on to whatever the next thing might be.

That hasn’t happened. It just seems to be getting more popular. More than once this year I’ve walked into a busy pub to discover that most people are drinking Guinness, while Paul Anspach, co-owner of Anspach and Hobday, semi-joked to me recently that “we don’t do many collaborations these days as we just make London Black all the time”. The newly opened Hand and Marigold, meanwhile, is selling O’Hara’s excellent nitro stout.

And then there’s Gibney’s, a pub in Shoreditch that is part of Richard Corrigan’s empire. Starting at some point later this year (maybe this month), it will have Beamish - absent from the UK since 2008, when the Cork brewery was bought by Heineken - on the bar permanently (other pubs, such as the Dog and Bell, are also getting in on the act). A preview last month led to scenes bordering on hysteria.

Interestingly (or not, your mileage may vary) Heineken UK still doesn’t actually offer Beamish as part of its portfolio - so any pubs with it on sale will have made some sort of bespoke importation arrangement (most likely with Heineken Ireland).

(In other stout news, Murphy's has released a map showing all the pubs where you can buy a pint in the UK).

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Dead Pubs

Are you interested in what happened to the 35 Old Kent Road pubs that have closed at some point over the past century-and-a-bit? You're in luck. Youtube's Tweedy Pubs has put together an informative if a touch depressing video.

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Room For One More?

A new Irish pub is opening in Southwark. Molly Mcs is coming to the site of the former Jack’s Bar in Isabella Street this spring, offering live music, intimate singing rooms and an extensive Irish spirits list.

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Pocket Pic

As mentioned last month, the team behind the Southampton Arms, The Cock Tavern & Howling Hops are preparing to launch a new pub in Islington. The Pocket will open next Thursday (20th) from midday.

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Bohem Blossoms

North London Czech lager specialists Bohem has taken on another pub, this time south of the river. Having acquired the Nicholas Nicholby in Finsbury Park last year, the brewery is now in charge at the Queen’s Arms in Battersea. The pub, which has been shut since 2022, is expected to be up and running within the next few months. 

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Sensory Six Nations

The Cabbage Patch pub in Twickenham is hosting a sensory friendly screening of this weekend’s England v Wales Six Nations rugby. This will include subtitles on one of the three televisions, no adverts, lower than usual sound levels, and fidget toys and noise blockers such as earplugs available. 

General Manager Stuart Green has long worked with local organisations such as Choice Support and Fuller’s charity partner Special Olympics GB to offer employment opportunities to people who are neurodiverse or have intellectual disabilities. 

“Having worked with a number of people with autism and other intellectual disabilities, I’ve seen how important it is to have spaces like this – that help cater to sensory difficulties,” he says. “It’s also so important to their families – to have a space where they can come together, socialise and have a good time. 

“If this adapted screening goes well, I will definitely look at hosting similar events for the upcoming Women’s Six Nations matches.”

Further Fuller’s/Twickenham news: Fuller’s has bought the White Swan, a very attractive riverside pub in leafy Twickenham. “I’ve always thought that The White Swan is the best pub in Twickenham, outside of our existing estate – so I’m delighted,” says Fuller’s Chief Executive, Simon Emeny.

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Two Pubs, One City: The Elm Tree, BR3, and the Blythe Hill Tavern, SE23

A WOMAN is leaving the Blythe Hill Tavern having (apparently) pilfered a prime piece of decoration from its wall. She is clutching a wood-mounted hurling stick and ball, an item that used to sit in pride of place just above the pub’s serving hatch, and she is heading out of the side door en route to a waiting taxi.

“She’s getting away!” I want to shout - those wood-mounted items do NOT come cheap - but something's not quite right. She’s not exactly skedaddling, for a start: there are too many fulsome goodbyes, too many hugs. I suspect I may have misjudged the situation. I have. This is not burglary but a gift, a memento for a regular customer (her dad) after many happy hours spent in this delightful boozer. Case closed.

The BHT has, very unusually, also been closed for the past two days. Tonight is the last Friday of February, and the first day of a new era. Con Riordan, who has run the pub since 1988, in the process turning it into the best proper pub in SE London, has retired, gone to play golf.

You can’t begrudge him that, but plenty of people are worried, including me. Pressed to name my favourite pub by the Telegraph last year, I picked the BHT, and was photographed looking gormless at the bar. I’m far from alone in my passion for this pub: over the last month I’ve received a steady stream of texts and emails from worried pals, speculating over who’d take over, and what they might change. Could it be a gastropub? The horror.

Well, we now know who’s taking over: County Clare’s Austin Whelan, who runs more than a dozen pubs around London and the south of England and has a compelling back story. 

He seems alright, but I wanted to be sure - so I decided to visit another of Whelan’s pubs, The Elm Tree in Beckenham, on the Sunday before he took charge at the BHT. Beckenham is not Catford/Forest Hill, but it’s not miles away: although there are obvious differences - the Elm Tree serves food, for example, and the floors are hard, not carpet - the similarities are striking. There’s a sizable crowd, live sport, smartly-dressed staff racing here and there behind the bar, and a very good, keenly priced pint of cask ale (Landlord, £4.60).

There aren’t many seats, though, with Liverpool FC, as popular in Beckenham as they are in Catford and County Clare, on the telly. A group of lads are sitting around a table filled with stemmed Cruzcampo glasses; a couple on the next table, dressed in Gaelic Football tops, watch the screen in sullen silence. The seats at the bar are filled with robustly-proportioned older men. Another man, sitting on a table with his wife, grunts with disappointment when he discovers that the kitchen is all out of sticky Asian pork ribs.

There’s no pork ribs - sticky or otherwise - at the BHT, but it doesn’t seem to detract from its appeal. That Friday, the place is packed - to the extent that me and a couple of aging pals are forced to sit outside, in the large back garden popular amongst the pub’s younger clientele.

So far, not much has changed. The price of a pint of Harvey’s remains £4.95; a fruit machine has gone (although, as I discover during a mid-afternoon pint a week later, only to be replaced with a more modern one); and various bits of decoration have departed, including a unforgettable picture that used to occupy the space next to the pub’s serving hatch, sort of adjacent to the stick and ball. It was called ‘Greed’, it was the work of an Irish artist called Ted Jones and it was, as they say, of its time. You can enjoy it here. 

Eventually the February chill forces us inside, where we manage to occupy a small table by the space vacated by the fruit machine. Next to us is a group of students, but not for long. Two very drunk, quite posh middle-aged men stumble in from the garden and, spotting a pair of empty stools amongst the students, sit down and introduce themselves. They’ve been here since 5pm, they slur, and they’re now chasing pints with whiskey. Five minutes later - through the sheer force of random drunk chat - they’ve driven off the students and occupy their corner triumphantly.

Textbook pub skills, but everyone seems to be in high spirits. On evenings like this, it feels like it would be harder to fuck the BHT up than to keep it as it is, but then running pubs always looks easier from the outside. And although I’ve got reservations about pubs where the person in ultimate charge is not always in situ, Whelan clearly understands what makes a good pub tick. A gastro-conversion doesn’t seem to be on the cards. 

Indeed, any major changes seem unlikely - although the garden, which is basically a concrete hill (and which includes an intriguing and apparently completely unused fenced-off grassy bit), is probably in line for a spruce-up. If that happens, plenty of picnic benches could be heading out of the door - although, unlike the hurling display, they’re unlikely to be in huge demand as keepsakes. (Although you never know, people are odd). 

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading! 

A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by Will Hawkes

If you enjoy London Beer City, please forward it to your friends. 

If you really like it, support it here  

What’s Old Is New

Adrian Kinsella carefully extracts a series of nails attaching a sheet to a wall in Stoke Newington’s Coach and Horses. He then lifts the sheet, exposing the wall behind it - and, with it, its remarkable decoration. 

Spread across the dark-wood panelling are a variety of late Victorian alcohol adverts, bold and straightforward, hidden for decades behind modern panels: No 3 Port, 1/- per pint; Brandy Hennessey’s or Martell’s, 2/6 per pint (about a tenner in modern money); and so on. 

There’s also a smaller notice, reading J Jones Wine and Spirit Merchant “Coach and Horses” Stoke Newington - presumably the landlord - and, beneath some of the booze ads, an even older sign, frustratingly incomplete. Glasses only & P … ged in this bar, it reads. A warning not to bring cheaper beer from the public bar into the lounge? Perhaps. 

The sheet is there to protect this remarkable array, found during ongoing renovation: Kinsella and his team feared light and dust could be causing damage. Long-term, the plan is to protect the adverts with resin or - as a final resort - put them behind glass, although Kinsella is loath to turn it into “a relic for gawping at”.

Either way, plenty of care is being taken. You can’t help wondering where we might be if similar care had been shown to London pubs in general over the years, which have been updated and improved so much that many of them are now shut, and too many of the rest are not pleasant places for a drink.

Perhaps, though, the tide is turning. It’s certainly true that a growing group of independent landlords is aiming to foster and promote a more traditional drinking experience, where the customer comes first. Kinsella, who already runs the Bank of Friendship in Highbury and the Carpenters’ just off Brick Lane, is among them, but he’s not alone.

There’s also Alice and Oli Carter-Esdale, preparing to reopen the Hand and Marigold, a delightful orange-tiled pub in Bermondsey; Peter Holt, proprietor of The Southampton Arms in Kentish Town and the Cock in Hackney, who’s about to launch The Pocket in Islington; the team behind South London’s Parched, who have recently revived The Clockhouse in East Dulwich; and Jack Duignan, owner of the Sutton Arms in Clerkenwell, who took on the King’s Arms in Bethnal Green in November, amongst others. 

Kinsella’s team has been working on the Coach and Horses since mid-January, with perhaps another six weeks’ work ahead of them. At the moment, the pub is a shell, bare wooden floors and piles of rubble, but there’ll be fixed seating around the walls, pews, and some standing space too. “I used to drink in here, and we’re going to go right back to the way it was before it was refurbished by the owner before last,” says Kinsella.

A similar approach prevails at the Hand and Marigold, which is closer to opening. Here there are strong links to the past, exemplified by photos of Alice’s great grandfather and great uncle, who lived nearby in the early 20th century, and the 19th-century parquet floor, salvaged from a building in Essex. The bar is made almost entirely from reclaimed early 18th (possibly late 17th Century) oak paneling. 

“We both love traditional boozers’ aesthetics,” says Oli Carter-Esdale. “When we first saw the pub last year, we were blown away by the exterior. With the interior having been ripped out, it felt important to restore something of a traditional aesthetic: a lot of rich wood, cast-iron table bases, comfortable fixed seating, no garish fixtures and fittings.

“Ambience is key — a pub should be warm, comfortable and accommodating.”

Both Alice and Oli have spent years working in hospitality, in London and elsewhere; Kinsella, who grew up in Wicklow in Ireland, worked for Mitchell & Butlers before taking on the Bank of Friendship in 2014. The Carpenters followed in 2023. It’s been a slow process, but it seems like his moment has arrived. There’s a real thirst in London for a more traditional pub experience at the moment, which is good news for Kinsella. 

“I’m trying to put that comfort back into [the pub experience],” he says. “A lot of places, it’s all about trying to get as many bodies as possible in the place. That’s not comfortable. We make pubs that I would want to drink in.” 

It’s not just an exercise in nostalgia, though. When he took on the Bank in 2014, he found a pub with a single women’s loo (“There were no women going in there, unsurprisingly”) and a garden that was used primarily as a rubbish tip. His aim was to turn the pub around, to attract a more varied clientele, to combine traditional levels of comfort with the quality now typical among Britain's best small breweries. That continues at the Coach and Horses, which will have cask ale from around Britain, plus The Kernel’s new nitro stout, amongst other options.

“[It’s about] taking the best of the old-school hospitality and putting it with the best of the new service standards around beer, and the best of the food, the amazing small street-food operators,” he says. “If you marry that together, that’s the sweet spot.”

There won’t be tables laid up for food at the Coach and Horses, though. Kinsella says he’s not chasing numbers; if someone wants to sit over a pint for a few hours, that’s fine. His or her glass won’t be cleared. Beer will cost what it costs. “We’re not gouging, but when [beer is] too cheap, someone is getting the rail and it’s normally the staff,” Kinsella says. “All our staff are on London living wage.” 

The thread that connects the London of today, with its living wage and craft beer, with the London of the 1890s, when a pint of No 3 Port cost a shilling, might seem a skinny one. But, as Kinsella notes, modernity and tradition thrive together elsewhere. Why not here too?

“It’s like when you go to France, and you go to the boulangerie,” Kinsella says. “There’s the bread, that’s the thing. Pubs should be held in the same respect over here [as bread and boulangeries are in France], but they haven’t been for a while.”

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Beer Flights

How far would you go for a pint in a London pub? Chris Croce crossed the world - although, to be fair, he had to for his job. A Qantas 787 pilot, Chris spent last year travelling into London from Perth once or twice a month and - with 48-hour rests between flights - decided to get to know the city better by visiting its pubs.

The impetus for this smart bit of thinking came from Citystack, a scheme that promotes independent pubs whilst offering customers money off. Croce spotted a Citystack map at The Pilgrim in Kennington in January 2024 - and by mid-December, he’d managed to tick off all 56 of the pubs on it, finishing with Simon The Tanner (see above, with Simon the Tanner’s Kundai Chakonda). There can’t be many Londoners who went to as many pubs last year.

Which pub did he enjoy the most? "There were so many great ones, but one of my favourites is the Pilgrim," he says. "The manager and the staff there are amazing. We got to know each other quite well."

Chris rode between the pubs on the capital’s handy (if potentially dangerous) rental bikes, taking in the sights and sounds as he went. He also took along colleagues on his pub jaunts. “It’s a fantastic way to see the city,” he says.

It’s also a reminder of how important pubs - particularly the good ones - are to London’s appeal for visitors. It’s perhaps no surprise that the creator of Citystack, Alison Boutoille, comes from somewhere else, France. It’s probably easier to see the value in pubs if you’re not from here. 

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Brass Neck of the Month

James Watt loves attention, which is presumably why he’s launched a campaign against public sector waste on his Linkedin account. So far, so dull - but the first response below his screed is perhaps more worthy of comment. 

James Yeomans writes that public finances are “swollen and inefficient”, which would be a legitimate if rather dull-witted remark from anyone else. Yeomans, though, was the man behind Hop Stuff, the Woolwich brewery that crowdfunded more than £1m from hundreds of small investors before falling in a heap and leaving said investors out of pocket. Is this someone who should be lecturing others on waste? No. 

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By The Wayside

The bad news just keeps on coming in the brewery world. By The Horns, founded in 2011 in Wimbledon but based in Surrey since 2021, has gone into liquidation, apparently dragged down by bad debt. And Fourpure’s tour of indignity continues: it’s now been bought by Keystone. The comments on the instagram post announcing this new move are worth a look.

Not everyone is struggling. Another former London brewery, Big Penny (itself a rebrand from Truman’s) announced last month that its Walthamstow event space is thriving, with annual sales exceeding £4m. “Christmas sales performance was +36% YOY driven by increased corporate bookings, two sold-out NYE shows and a curling activation which attracted over 3,000 additional visitors,” it revealed in a otherwise humdrum press release. As ever, the money seems to be in hospitality, not brewing.  

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New Green Scene

Since the close of The Experiment in 2023, Cornish haze-kings Verdant have lacked a London base - but no longer. Brixton’s Craft Metropolis is to play host to ‘Verdant In Residence’, with six taps, fridges full of cans, events and other bits and bobs. More details here. 

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Irish, Swiss, European

Gloom hangs over much of London’s brewing scene, but for pubs the picture is more mixed. Two Irish-run classics are currently on the market: McGlynns in King’s Cross, which has been closed since former landlord Gerry Dolan died in 2023, is available to buy for £3m, while The Blythe Hill Tavern in Forest Hill, where long-term landlord Con Riordan has decided to take a much-deserved retirement, is looking for someone new to take charge. 

The closure of Ye Olde Swiss Cottage, meanwhile, has generated plenty of coverage, perhaps because it’s not clear what is intended for the site. Could it be that Sam Smiths’ habit of closing pubs and then just keeping them shut without explaining why has reached London? Watch this space.

There are three interesting new openings. The European in Leyton is soon to open in a former Spoons/Laines property; The White Horse in Hampstead, until recently The Cork and Bottle, is back; and the Knave of Clubs, a collaboration between James Dye, co-owner of the Camberwell Arms, and Benjy Leibowitz, formerly of hospitality giants JKS, is about to re-open in Shoreditch. 

The Knave, which boasts a couple of gorgeous original mirrors, was last a pub in 1994, and has been a French restaurant for much of the time since. It looks like it’ll operate along the same lines as the Devonshire in Soho, with a pub downstairs and food on the first floor. There’ll be beer from Allsops, Guinness and London breweries. 

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Two Pubs, One City: The Rose & Simon The Tanner, both SE1

I haven’t checked the records, but I’m certain this January was the longest and greyest in Britain’s history. (February hasn’t been too snazzy, either). The other day I stepped out of my front door into a thick, freezing miasma of air-moisture. It was about 80 percent humidity, or thereabouts. A terrible vibe. 

Aside from how awful it is, the problem with this weather is it really impairs your inspiration. Normally I find it easy to come up with stupid ideas for this section, but this time there was nothing. Pubs with the word ‘chicken’ in the name; Pubs with the smelliest customers; Pubs popular with the staff of FT’s HTSI section (restaurants). All of these ideas were rightly and resoundingly spiked.

In the end, I was so desperate that I decided to go for a wander to see if inspiration struck - in Bermondsey, because it’s one of central London’s most interesting neighbourhoods, and because I was nearby doing something else anyway. 

Having alighted at London Bridge station, it took me mere minutes to find a pub - although it wasn’t immediately clear it was a pub. The Rose is very understated, done up in dark grey paint with the name in gold above the door. Above that there’s what looks like an old pub sign, with pale-blue decoration - a Union flag and an ensign, an anchor and floral detail - on a white background. Understated and quite attractive.

Inside it was definitely a pub and not a Bermondsey-style art experiment, despite the various pictures depicting former royals in quirky form (e.g. the last queen in a sort of headscarf, except the headscarf is flowers wow trippy). There were exactly the pints you'd expect to find in a London pub during the great gloom of ‘25, namely Camden, Beavertown, Asahi, Guinness, Peroni and that cider with a pig on the label. One handpump was in operation, from which I was served a pint of Dark Star Hophead (£6.30) in a jug.

I can no longer remember how this beer tasted before Fuller’s bought it, but it’s an interesting experience now. The beer was in excellent condition and pretty hoppy, but there was also a huge diacetyl-like butterscotch aroma coming off it. I normally can’t abide buttery beer, but this was actually OK. The butter balanced the bitter, so to speak.

In addition to art, The Rose offers music; first there was something that sounded like Oasis and probably was Oasis, and then the song about drinking in LA that was massive in 1999. 

It sent me spinning into the sort of reverie that becomes increasingly common as you get older and more sedentary. 'Drinking In LA' came out just before I went to live in California for a year, and it gave me a wholly false idea of what drinking in LA was like. I thought it would be like drinking in England but sunny - but it wasn’t. I was only 20 and no-one would sell me booze, whereas in England I bought my first pint at the age of 15. (Maybe the lyrics made all this clear, I don’t know, I didn't listen very carefully.)

In terms of drinking and LA, the best experience actually happened to my future wife, who was bought a drink by Lemmy (RIP) in a Sunset Strip bar. Nothing this good happened to me, although I did develop a passion for Natural Ice, America’s greatest beer. I don’t know what they put in it, but the hangovers are almost aa much fun as the drinking.

Anyway, enough of that bollocks. After The Rose, I continued walking south, past a nice-looking Fuller’s pub - the Leather Exchange - which nonetheless didn’t really appeal, and then east on Long Lane. This is where I stumbled across Simon The Tanner, a pub I haven’t been in for at least a decade.

As I recall, StT was a craft-beer early adopter but then dropped off the radar as everyone else jumped on the bandwagon. The beer range is still excellent - Orbit, Anspach & Hobday, Lost & Grounded, for eg - although I chose Belleville’s Bellevue Mild (£5.80), one of two cask beers on offer, and was soon very glad I did, because it was delicious, chocolate-y and creamy. 

After 15 minutes as the only customer, three women came in, who - it was soon clear - worked at the pub. It was pub quiz night. One of them fielded a phone call from a customer who was fretting they were going to be too late. She swapped their booking from 8.15pm to 8, and all was well (“You’ve got to get here by 8 … they won’t wait!”).

One of them had been on holiday (‘We went to Venice, we didn’t realise it was a cultural city. There was no nightlife. We were chilling in our room by 9pm’), one had itchy teeth, all were vociferous on the subject of a mutual acquaintance and his/her tall tale (“It’s weird, it’s weird, it’s weird. I feel it. I have a sixth sense”). 

Eventually, another customer came in, a diminutive Scotsman sporting a tidy chin beard, and ordered a pint of Mild. Having handed over the baton of lone Mild-drinking customer, I left, heading south to catch a bus home. On the way, I walked past the Hand & Marigold - see above - which, even amid this winter’s endless gloom, was a delight. That said - roll on summer. 

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading! 

A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by Will Hawkes

Enjoy London Beer City? Support it here 

A Gentle Orbit

Change is constant on the Walworth Road, although that’s hard to believe on a lethargic Wednesday morning. Red double-decker buses chug ever so slowly up South London’s central artery, as they always have, but around them things are moving on. The northern end is now home to a large Latin American community and towering blocks of modern flats; Walworth Town Hall, opposite the former Labour Party headquarters, is being converted into a ‘dynamic cultural community and workspace hub’; and, most earth-shakingly of all, Marks & Spencer closed in June, having served the road for 111 years. 

An idiosyncratic home, then, for Orbit, perhaps London’s most resolutely unchanging of modern breweries. This month marks Orbit’s 10th birthday, a time for celebration - of which more later - but also reflection. What does Orbit have to show for a decade of brewing? Fewer fireworks than at some of their contemporaries, no doubt, but arguably something else of greater value: a strong identity, one that ties traditional European brewing to a solid, unflashy commitment to keeping the show on the road, economically speaking.

At the heart of this is founder Robert Middleton, a Scotsman whose decision to open a brewery came after a road-trip around his native land’s breweries in 2013, inspired by Iain Banks’ whisky book, Raw Spirit. He intended to turn his own journey into a book, but instead returned to London having fallen in love with beer, and keen to start a brewery. 

Having spoken to other members of the London Brewers’ Alliance, and with the advice of former Twickenham head brewer Stuart Medcalf, he settled on an archway yards from the Walworth Road. “I knew nothing about Walworth,” Robert, who lives in Camden, says with a chuckle. “I barely knew Elephant or Camberwell. But I liked the idea that it was a little bit individual, and it worked well in practical terms. We’ve got a good yard, good access. We could just get on with setting up a brewery.”

Key to Orbit’s original vision was brewer Mario Canestrelli, who joined in May 2014 (Paul Spraget, once of Fourpure, is the current head brewer). Mario was (and presumably still is) passionate about traditional German brewing, a passion that rubbed off on Robert. The Orbit team - 13 including Robert - now takes annual beer trips to the Continent’s great beer cities, from Bamberg to Brussels. Robert himself is a regular visitor to Germany, and was in Munich last month to see Scotland play the hosts (over which we shall draw a tactful veil). 

The European city that means most to Orbit, though, is Cologne. The key brand is a Kolsch, Nico, and the brewery regularly hosts nights that celebrate the city’s idiosyncratic beer culture, complete with 200ml glasses of beer served at the table, and each beer drunk marked on the drinker’s beer mat. For those of us who love European beer culture, it’s great fun - but I wonder how much Orbit’s excellent flagship beer has managed to ‘move the dial’, so to speak, on drinkers’ understanding of German beer culture?

“I think some do [have a better understanding],” says Robert. “There’s been people who’ve come to appreciate Kolsch through what we do. That’s wonderful, but just as valid is a guy who drinks Stella who tries Nico once, and it’s an entry beer. My girlfriend only likes Nico, out of our beers. It’s a craft beer, but it’s accessible too.”

You can’t say fairer than that. It’s this sort of pragmatism that has kept Orbit on the straight and narrow at a time when many breweries are struggling, a pragmatism that (for all the brewery’s German focus) seems very Scottish. “I think [the fact that I’m] a formally trained professional actuary has helped!” Robert says. “There’s natural financial discipline, but when I came into this I wanted it to be for the long term. I want to be doing this 10 years from now, and 10 years on from then if I’m still around.”

Perhaps it’s this quiet solidity that ensures staff hang around longer than they might at other London breweries, from drayman Chris Newby (five years) to general manager Robbie Sykes (almost 10 years). 

This persistent, unflashy brewery may have found its moment, with a model that takes in gentle growth and a refusal to rely on any single account. Orbit makes around 5000 hectolitres a year, having grown by about 20 percent annually for the first six or seven years and more gradually since. It focuses on restaurants, cafes, hotels and craft-beer pubs (none of which make up more than 10 percent of production), and still packages in bottles, despite the rush to cans that has taken place over the past few years. 

Tomorrow, the brewery is open for the high point of its birthday celebrations, a party taking in BBQ and Orbit members on the decks (see Sarah Lazenby, head of sales & DJ, above). Next Friday it’s another Nico night, this time taking in Neu, the brewery’s Altbier that had been brought back from the dead for the occasion (Why did it go out of production? “People didn’t really know the style, and no-one could pronounce the name”). 

Kolsch and Alt together in the same place? It wouldn’t fly in Cologne, but down on the Walworth Road things are moving on. 

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Party Pub

When Chris French, landlord of The Mitre pub in Richmond, stood for election last week, the aim was presumably to garner plenty of attention and attract custom to his pub. On the first count, he seems to have been successful; on the latter, only time will tell. As for electoral success, that has proven rather more elusive: he finished sixth in Richmond Park, gaining 349 votes, although he did manage to beat the SDP. (It looks like a nice pub, fwiw).

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Bad Ticket

Cahoots Ticket Hall Boozer, a 1940s-themed pub, has opened in Soho. Sounds like a lotta fun but, alas, the 1940s theme doesn’t appear to extend to the beer selection, which is as bland as bland gets. 

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Beer Bus

For lazy so-and-sos, the Deserter crew (partially) behind the Shirkers Rest in New Cross sure do get a lot done. Their latest escapade is a collaboration with fellow SE London micropubs Green Goddess (Blackheath) and Rusty Bucket (Eltham) that will see an open-top vintage bus travel between the three pubs during the afternoon/evening of 20 July. Four stops at each are planned, with Stephen of Green Goddess fame driving and the Deserter duo Andy and Vince working as conductors. 

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‘Craft Beer’

The last week has taken me to Wembley (AC/DC, see below) and Lord’s and the news, I’m afraid, is not good. Camden Pale and Goose Island were as good as it got at the home of football, while at Lord’s ‘craft beer’ is apparently Brooklyn Pilsner, Shipyard IPA, Hobgoblin and, most intriguing of all, alcohol-free San Miguel. 

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In Dept

South-East London’s hippest neighbourhood has a new pub: The Lucky Anchor, on Deptford High Street. Last week it hosted a 10th birthday party for Hop, Burns and Black, and the reports are positive. Most pleasingly of all, it has two cask lines, which were dispensing Verdant and Deja this past week. Great news for SE London casketeers.

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Tavern Tales: The Biggest Pub in Britain

… is taking a break this week but will be back with a bang in August. A big bang!

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What the Dickens

Bohem, North London’s Czech brewery, has taken on a second pub, The Nicholas Nickelby in Finsbury Park. Expect Czech-style lagers (including Nicholas, a new 4.2 percent ABV black lager), Czech wines/spirits and London’s first ‘chladici vana’ (a cooler bath for glassware).

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Two Pubs, One City

De Hems & Albert’s Schloss, Soho

Where do you meet an old pal before going to see even older rockers AC/DC at Wembley? Earl’s Court, given its strong Aussie connections? The Scottish Stores in King’s Cross, given the original band were of Scottish stock (and so is aforementioned pal, Gordon)? Or somewhere like The Cheshire Cheese, which, like AC/DC, fell into a solid groove in about 1768 and has stuck with it ever since?

None of these, it turns out. You go to De Hems, Soho’s Dutch-ish pub, because it's recently been renovated and it’s really close to somewhere else you want to go (of which more later). 

At 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon it’s busy-ish, mostly with men in pre-Covid business wear: ill-fitting suits, no ties, a smattering of skinny-fit v-neck jumpers. Most of them will not see 45 again. There’s a big TV on in the corner - it’s showing the Tour de France, where Mark Cavendish is about to win a record 35th stage - and there are high tables (boo hiss) around the front section of the bar.

De Hems, which is owned by M&B, made a big fuss in February about its renovation, but if you didn’t know you wouldn’t guess. It’s quite ‘light touch’. The bar looks relatively new, with some snazzy tiling, but the floor is dark wood and the ceiling a sort of dried-blood colour that looks like it’s been there a while. There’s a lot of ageing beer memorabilia on the walls, and some Dutch stuff too, including a Holland football shirt in the corner. 

In terms of beer, it’s all big-brand stuff on draught, both the ubiquitous (Beavertown) and the Belgian (De Koninck, Lindeman), plus lots more interesting stuff in bottle. I blundered by going for De Koninck, Antwerp’s iconic brown beer. Not only is it eye-wateringly expensive (£9.05!) but it also tastes odd, like the beer has been sitting there for a while because no-one else is drinking it. But of course no-one else is drinking it: everyone drinks Beavertown now. It’s the law. 

There are good aspects. The main door is wide open, always nice on a sunny day in London. The staff are welcoming. There’s a pair of older gents nearby discussing wild times (“we ‘ad shedloads of beer”); at the next table, a man in a rugby shirt is drinking Westmalle. Three men in suits listen intently to what a young woman is telling them.

But who am I kidding? Given the competition around here, it’s very unlikely I’ll be back. 

What I’m really here for is just around the corner, on Shaftesbury Avenue, where the Rainforest Cafe used to reign. This huge site is now home to Albert’s Schloss, an arrival from Manchester promising plentiful lager, various Germanic and not-so Germanic food items (pretzels … fondue … boeuf bourguignon?!) and a 2am licence. It feels like another bit of good news for beer-drinkers in Soho.

Alas, it is not good news for me on this Wednesday evening. Maybe I missed it on the website - it wouldn’t be the first time - but it appears this Schloss is geschlossen to normal punters this evening, despite having been open since the weekend, as it’s closed for a party. I can only gaze into its cavernous Germanic interior, the taste of an unfiltered glass of Bitburger turning to ashes in my mouth. 

Happily, there’s another option nearby: the Devonshire, which you may have read about here, or on any and all of the other media outlets that exist in the known world. Yes, it’s been hyped, and yes, they do sell a lot of Guinness - but it is a nice pub. Ever the contrarian, I went for a (v good, sparkled) Landlord. 

The hype has had a downside. You're now not allowed to stand down one side of it (Denman Street), probably for some spurious noise/access reasons. The other side, though, is still packed with happy punters, including friend of London Beer City Phil Lowry, once a brewer at Brew Wharf in Borough (amongst many other things), now based in the US, working for a major hop company. He’s with Shaun O’Sullivan (amongst others), founder of 21st Amendment brewery in San Francisco.

We chat happily for 20 minutes, largely about the price of things in the US, before Gordon and I head off to Wembley, where we enjoy AC/DC (now basically the Angus Young show, since Brian Johnson’s voice is shot and the other three lads have departed, for various reasons), an excellent mixed grill at Taste of Lahore on Wembley High Road - and a few pints of pretty awful Goose Island-branded beer, on offer alongside Camden’s insipid Pale Ale at the ‘craft beer’ stand. It’s not quite as bad as the De Koninck, though. 

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading!

A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by Will Hawkes

Enjoy London Beer City? Support it here 

Untied

4 July is Independence Day across the Atlantic, a jamboree (so I’m led to believe) of meat-grillin’, star-spangled caterwaulin’ and random whoopin’. This year, though, our American cousins are not going to have the fun to themselves: there’ll be a degree of joy in Bermondsey, too, albeit in a more restrained form. 

On that day, Anspach and Hobday’s six-month lease of the St James of Bermondsey pub runs out, and - as co-owner Jack Hobday puts it, albeit in not so many words - not a moment too soon.

That might seem odd, on the face of it. It’s a nice pub in a lively area, cheek-by-jowl with some of London's most important food companies, from Natoora to Neal’s Yard and The Kernel. It’s well-decorated - tastefully pastel - with a variety of seating options and all the sports TV you could ever want.

But, as so often with British pubs, the devil is in the detail. The St James is owned by Stonegate, Britain’s biggest pub group, and if A&H wanted to keep the pub going, they’d have had to accept a five-year deal at 90 percent of the advertised £49,972 a year, with no break, although they’d only be paying 60 per cent for the first two years (they’re currently paying a third).

For many pubs that would be a great deal, but the St James is not doing great business. According to Jack, it makes a little bit more than £6000 net a week - less than their nearby railway arch, which has very limited opening hours, and well below Stonegate’s forecast of £11,845 pw. Thanks to their initial deal with Stonegate, they’re not losing money, but after July 4 they would be.

So why take it on in the first place? After all, the pitfalls of dealing with some pubcos are not unknown. “We wanted to have a pub in Bermondsey which sold some local beer, with A&H being at the forefront,” says Jack. “But the beer we’ve been able to offer is not what we thought we’d be able to offer: in terms of small breweries, we can only use them on cask.”

Stonegate (which reportedly has debt of £2.2bn) uses The Beer Company for its procurement, but the range of keg beer A&H have been able to get has been limited to big-brewery brands, according to Jack, who had wanted to offer Budvar before it was delisted because it wasn’t popular enough. “[Our options were limited to] the latest Spanish lagers mixed with Carlsberg, Carling, Heineken and their sub-craft brands like Camden, Beavertown or Brixton, plus a handful of others,” he says. “Some of the beers are fine but it’s not what we’re about.”

And then there’s the prices. Guinness can be bought by London publicans for anything from about £110 to £190 for a 50-litre keg at the moment, depending on who’s selling and who’s buying, but A&H were quoted £210 for the St James. 

A&H was able to sell its own beer to the pub only on cask, but even then it was a painful experience. They sell their own beer into Stonegate at around £70 a firkin (72 pints, in theory), but the pub buys it at £130 or £140 a go. “We even have to deliver the beer direct as part of that sale!” says Jack.

It’s been a chastening experience, all told, but Jack says there are elements that have been enjoyable. “The community element has been great,” he says. “We’ve had post-natal classes in our function room, we’ve got our quiz, and the pub is still popular with Millwall fans on match days. And we saved it from being closed, which I’m very pleased about. And it’s been profitable for us - but it wouldn’t be with the new rent.”

So would they consider doing it again, with a different pub? “I think we’ve shown we can do it - our team, led by Simon Courtney, has been brilliant,” he says. “We’ll have another go, but it’d probably have to be a free-of-tie option. You’ve got to have a good location with good facilities, and they’re hard to find. We won’t rush into anything, but it’s definitely on the radar.”

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Man’s Drink

Do women drink beer? Not very much, if the results of a poll commissioned by Dea Latis and presented at Five Points’ brewery in Hackney last month are to be believed. Only 14 percent of women drink beer each week (compared to 50 percent of men), a three percent drop since the group’s first report back in 2018.

The report suggests that there are a number of key barriers, including the notion that beer is highly calorific with negative health implications, and the way it is presented and served. Apparently London, where “traditional views” around beer are being challenged, is the one bright spot.

I don’t have a great deal to offer in terms of insight on this - for obvious reasons - but I do find it fascinating that beer appears to be less popular amongst British women than it is in comparable European nations. Why should that be?

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Churchillian Chat

Gerry O’Brien is perhaps London’s most well-known landlord, having transformed the Churchill Arms in Notting Hill into one of the city’s most famous pubs. He’s spoken to Elton Mouna, ex-Remarkable Pubs MD, about his time running the pub for a new podcast, ‘From Ordinary to Extraordinary’. Find it here on Spotify and here on Apple. 

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 Tavern Tales: ‘The Tavern Where You Needn’t Drink’

This is the second part of a series about the Downham Tavern, once Britain's biggest pub, now mostly a Co-op.

Datas, the Memory Man, legend of London music hall and inspiration for the character Mr Memory in Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, is on stage at the Downham Tavern. Outside it’s a stormy Friday night, August 1931, but inside the hall is packed, a record attendance, dozens locked out. Three hours of entertainment featuring many of music hall’s greatest names, from Tom Costello to Jock Whiteford, ‘The Smart Scot’, await - but the Memory Man is first. 

Datas is as keenly anticipated as any of his co-stars, because he knows, or seems to know, everything. Derby winners are his speciality, in an era when the Derby still meant something. He reels off a list of winners in response to a question from the crowd, ending with his catchphrase: “Am I right, sir?”

He does jokes, too. “What was Adam and Eve’s Telephone Number?” “281 Apple,” Datas - real name William James Maurice Bottle  -  replies, to cackles of laughter. 

He even tells a few disbelieving punters the date of their birth. How does he do it?

But not everyone is convinced. An Irishman pipes up, demanding to know the date of a battle in Ireland. He’s not happy with Datas’s answer, and advances to the footlights to remonstrate, before being convinced to let it go.

Among the crowd is Daily Herald journalist Hannen Swaffer, who tracks down landlord Fred Johnson. “That Irishman’s a stranger,” he insists. “He doesn’t come from around here. The Downham people all behave themselves.”

Swaffer (above; according to the British Journalism Review, he was remembered after his death for “little more than the mixture of dandruff and cigarette ash on his velvet collar”) is much taken with the show. He likes the acts. He likes the crowd. He likes the notion that a music-hall revival might be on the cards, even if its real glory days are a few decades in the past. 

What Swaffer, boozer-turned-teetotaler, really likes though is the attitude to alcohol. “Alcohol is dying out naturally,” he tells his Daily Herald readers. “Drinking is not encouraged,” he quotes Mrs Johnson. “My husband often goes onto the stage when the show is on and tells the audience they need not buy any alcohol. ‘I am not asking you here to buy drink,’ he says.” 

In the 1930s, entertainment at the Downham Tavern was a sanitised version of the recent past, a reflection, perhaps, of Britain’s own refusal to face the future. There were dances for old folk, shows for kids, regular meetings of the Old Contemptibles, an organisation for First World War veterans. Music hall might have been born amid the booze and sleaze of late Victorian London, but by the time it reached Downham it had been comprehensively scrubbed. Like the residents, it had apparently thrown off its urban past.

But in a world of cinemas and recorded music, it was on its way out, however you presented it. When Frank Johnson (also a noted parrot fancier) and his wife, both brought up in the Music-hall world, retired in 1938, an era ended. Music hall made a swift exit, following table service, ditched the previous year. 

But what would follow? That night in 1931, Johnson had told Swaffer that - unlike that uncouth Irishman - his regulars were good as gold. “In fifteen months we have never had one case of rowdyism,” he said. “Family parties come here and they are all as quiet as lambs.” Even if it were true then, it wouldn’t be for long.

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Tenth Life

Catford’s biggest boozer, the former Black Horse and Harrow, has re-opened as the Duke of Catford. It was until recently Ninth Life. Good luck to the new owners - given the huge size and the way it’s changed hands at regular intervals over the past decade, they’ll probably need it. Plus points: the food looks promising and it’s open until 1am on Friday and Saturday.

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Just Deserts 

South London’s premier pub-going partnership, Deserter, will be celebrating its tenth birthday on Saturday with an event at the pub they co-own, The Shirker’s Rest in New Cross. Ned Boulting of cycling fame will be firing questions at the pair - authors of Today South London, Tomorrow South London and Shirk, Rest and Play - and there’ll be some free beer. It all kicks off at 5pm.

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Two Pubs, One City 

The Spread Eagle, W1C & The Jackalope, W1G

“London still has most of its 4,000 pubs, and they still number amongst them pubs of every kind. Old, sham-old, and comparatively new; prosperous and neglected, smart and shabby; pubs standing forlornly in the midst of bomb-damage, with their top storey missing and one bar gone, and pubs lurking safely under the great piles of modern office blocks.”

When Maurice Gorham wrote this in Back to the Local, London was recovering from a catastrophic war. Now, with London on the brink of recovery from a catastrophic government (zing! Another crushing blow for Sunak), you could make much the same claim - excepting, I will grudgingly admit, the bomb damage. We’ve even got about the same number of pubs: 3600, on the most reliable recent evidence I can find (although there were 5000+ 20 years’ ago). 

Gorham’s book, long considered a classic of the genre, was republished last week. It’s a handsome edition, with original illustrations by Edward Ardizzone that evoke pure cosiness and a handy fold-out map at the front featuring those pubs that are still operating. (The pub index at the back is the original one, so it doesn’t quite tally with the map, but let’s not quibble).

A delightful read, no doubt, full of enticing detail and Forties charm - but given the map, it’s clearly intended to act as a modern-day guide too. Who could resist? Not me, which is how I found myself weaving between disorientated tourists and American Candy fans just after Thursday lunchtime last week, en route to The Spread Eagle south of Oxford Street on Woodstock Street.

It’s immediately obvious something has changed since Gorham’s day. Even an architectural ignoramus like me can tell this is a fifties/sixties building, with the Spread Eagle tucked into a tight nook at ground level, seating in front. Apparently Gorham’s Spread Eagle was on Oxford Street; well, now it’s not. In fact there aren’t any pubs on Oxford Street west of The Flying Horse, once The Tottenham, right up by Tottenham Court Road station. 

One of the great attractions of the Spread Eagle, Gorham wrote, was “the two dizzy blondes [who] both sprang forward to serve you as soon as you opened the door”, which is a nice bit of period colour, ahem, but obviously I condemn that sort of thing in no uncertain terms. Nowadays the bar is staffed by a middle-aged man and a young woman, and there’s no springing - although service is comfortably the right side of competent.

This is a Greene King pub, so I’m well-pleased to spot Black Sheep Bitter (bitter, a touch tangy, a bit Shepherd Neame-y; £6.10), which I take to a seat in the back. It’s a surprisingly small pub, cosy, albeit there’s apparently more room upstairs. The front bar opens out a little into the library-like back room, but you could still get 20 of these in an average Spoons.

A Spanish-speaking couple are at a nearby table, soaking up a bit of English pub culture: she with a glass of Coke, he with regularly replenished pints of Camden Hells. I’m glad to see they’ve ordered lunch, since Gorham mentions approvingly the restaurant that was part of the original boozer. Fish and chips for her (£17.45), pie and chips (£15.25) for him, which is a pretty 1949-adjacent order even if the prices have gone up a bit. 

“Gracias,” the barman says as he puts their food down, a nice touch although I think traditionally they should be thanking him.

There’s an interesting mixed vibe going on here. On one hand, it’s relaxed. Gentle house music fills the room, golf is on the telly (Never ends, golf, does it? Like tennis. There’s always a tournament on somewhere, it’s always boring, and the winner gets eleventy billion dollars) and the clientele is a subdued mix of tourists and office staff.On the other hand, the barman - a no-nonsense scouser - has to chase some kids out of the pub for a reason I can’t ascertain because I can’t quite see what’s going on. There’s plenty of shouting before he wins the day and returns to the bar triumphantly.

I quite like this pub, given the circs, but it doesn’t really evoke Gorham’s book, not least because it wasn’t built when he wrote it. Happily, a far more sympathetic scene awaits me 10 minutes’ walk north through Marylebone (Fancy car count: three Porsches, which isn’t that impressive. I saw a Lamborghini in SE4 the other day. Raise your game, Marylebone, Mayfair is laughing).

The Jackalope may have changed its name (from The Dover Castle), but in all other ways it’s a period-drenched delight. The bar, a bowed wooden effort, is original. There are three rooms, albeit one of them has been opened up a bit. The front windows still say ‘Dover Castle’. The barman is a genial Irishman. The cask ale is sadly sparkled, but good value, and from London: Redemption Trinity, £4.60.  

Even the clientele impresses. In the corner there’s a woman with her mum and gurgling new-born baby: grandma buys mum a pint of Adnams and a cider for herself. Three middle-aged men chat comedy. A group of office pals spill out into the Mews after lunchtime pints, promising to do it again. A man in a grey suit buys a pint of Bitburger. There’s eclectic, reasonable-level music, from Black Betty to a Rolling Stones cut so deep (We Had It All) Keith Richards has probably forgotten recording it.

In the book, Gorham as near as says this is his favourite pub, and ‘Mooney’, who ran it then, his favourite landlady. “One of the most friendly resorts in the West End … old-fashioned but bright … gives a lot of pleasure.” I’d say that’s all still true. It’s the sort of pub where, as soon as you’ve left, you want to go back (and that’s before you mention LIU Xiaomian, the noodle restaurant downstairs).

There’s a touch of magic about this place. Just as I’m finishing up my pint, the barman comes round to write names on the tables booked for that evening. I can hardly believe my eyes when I see what, in neat block capitals, he puts on mine: M Gorham?!

Sadly no - this is just banter. It’s H Smith, and he’s bringing 12 of his pals at 6.30pm. I bet they have a great time, as would Gorham if he could pop in today. Few pubs in the West End - even in London - evoke the sense of timeless pleasure you get on a warm afternoon at the Jackalope, with the doors wide open and the noise of the city a Mews-length away.  

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading!

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Contract Hit

Last year Todd Nicolson, beer industry veteran and co-founder of lower-calorie brand Lowrise, was contacted by Trading Standards. “I got a 12-page letter saying we weren't allowed to use the term ‘low-calorie’,” he says with a chuckle. “But right at the end, at the bottom of the last page, it says ‘but you could arguably get away with lower’ - so we just changed all our marketing stuff to lower.” 

Impressive flexibility - and just the sort of thing Lowrise will need to be a success in the increasingly crowded ‘lifestyle beer’ market. They have plenty of rivals, from well-known brands like Lucky Saint and Wolfpack to upstarts such as Prime Time and Lost In Town. 

Most follow an increasingly worn playbook. The beer is contract-brewed, with a general vagueness about where it’s made (although not in the case of Lowrise); social media presence is everything; and the companies themselves tend to be based in West London. Shall we call it beer’s ‘Made In Chelsea’ era?

Lowrise stands out in this respect, too, because it was launched in East London, where three of the four Kiwi founders live (although not Nicolson (he's south-west London) and inspired by the demand for ‘low-carb’ beers in their homeland. Nicolson, 48, has been involved in beer for the past dozen years, having arrived in London in 2001, most notably as the man behind the New Zealand Beer Collective, which imported Kiwi beers into Europe and also dabbled in contract brewing too.

Contract brewing is arguably the key element of the new lifestyle beer market, which makes sense when you look at the beleaguered state of British brewing. It’s a buyers/contractors market, because lots of breweries have unused brewing capacity. “I’ve never had so many [brewery] people cold-calling, contacting us about spare capacity,” says Nicolson, who also works for Kiwi hop producers Freestyle Hops. “It’s a good time in that sense, but it’s still hard. We brewed our first batch with Round Corner Brewing [in Melton Mowbray] but they didn’t have enough capacity, so we’re brewing with [Devon lager specialists] Utopian now.”

Changing where beer is brewed can, as regular drinkers of Neck Oil over the years will attest, radically change the taste. Nicolson relates an incident from Lowrise’s pop-up bar at Netil Market, when on one particular evening bar staff replaced a finished Round Corner-brewed keg with one made at Utopian. “It tasted completely different - still awesome, but different,” he says. “One person came up to the bar and asked if they could swap it for the beer they’d had before!”

The sole beer, a lager, is made with Nelson Sauvin, a New Zealand hop. The key is the use of two enzymes: Glucoamylase, which strips out all the residual sugars and makes for a really dry, crisp beer, and Clarex, which removes the Gluten, allowing it to be sold as Gluten-free. That latter health claim has proven more compelling to customers than the low-calorie aspect thus far, says Nicolson.

And then there’s branding, a fundamental feature of any lifestyle beer. Lowrise’s peering sunshine face was dreamt up by Tom Delamore, one of the founders and - in his professional life - a creative director. It appears to be working: from Monday, Lowrise will be available in Waitrose stores, the end result, apparently, of a guerrilla campaign that saw founders place their beers on supermarket chain’s shelves, take pictures and send them to the buying team.

What’s next? A pale ale (“not murky”) and a shandy, according to Nicolson, although the focus for the moment is on fulfilling Waitrose’s order, which will mean doubling production. The next few years could be interesting for Lowrise and ‘the category’ - but whether they’re conceived in New Zealand or Chelsea, contract-brewed lifestyle beers appear to be here to stay.

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Three Sheets

Do you like both literature and beer? You’re in luck. Next Friday sees The Tate Modern host Pages, an event taking in three breweries (Verdant, Beak, Track) and talks by three authors, Eliza Clarke, David Keenan and Rose Boyt. Pricey, yes - but authors have to eat too.

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Hertz of Oak

I’d always had McMullen’s pegged as one of those sleepy regional breweries, pumping out classic easy-going cask ale for a gradually dwindling local audience. I was wrong! The Hertfordshire brewery has long run The Nag’s Head, a prime boozer next to the tube in Covent Garden, but of late they’ve been on the move in the capital, snapping up all sorts of interesting sites, including The Duke of York in Fitzrovia and The Lock Tavern in Camden (the latter was run until recently by the East London Pub Company, which went belly-up last year). One to watch. 

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Poorly Pony

Parsons Green’s White Horse, for so long an essential address in London beer, appears to have taken a turn for the mediocre. On a recent visit big-name keg beers proliferated and half the cask ales were off half-way through Saturday afternoon.  

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NEW MINI SERIES!

Tavern Tales

THE Downham Tavern is not much to look at. On Tuesday this week, the first warm afternoon of the year, you could have walked past without a second glance were it not for the boisterous gaggle of drinkers, complete with muzzled XL Bully, sitting at the picnic tables in front. It’s a nondescript nineties building, a beefed-up Barrett Home of a boozer next to a large Co-op. Perhaps the only notable thing about it is it’s a resolutely working-class pub in a city where they’ve become a relative rarity. 

But this South-East London pub is remarkable - or at least its predecessor, which existed for over 60 years until its mid-90s demolition, was. It was, at different times and for different people, ‘the most up-to-date tavern in Britain’, ‘the only tavern where you needn't drink’, ‘England’s biggest pub’, home to ‘the longest bar in England’, and ‘Britain’s toughest pub’. It hosted table service, music hall, acid house, cowboys, David Bowie, gangsters, multiple punch-ups and misdemeanours, and much more besides. It was a dream and a nightmare and now it’s a memory - and a fading one at that. 

It deserves better than to be forgotten. The Downham Tavern was a truly significant establishment, easily as significant as any of the tourist places in Town and much bigger: twice the size of the nearby (and still standing, albeit closed) Fellowship in Bellingham, capable of accomodating 1000 customers in the pub and another 1000 in the concert hall behind, and still serving an average of 2,500 pints a day in the early 1980s. It covered the space taken by the modern Tavern, and the Co-op supermarket. It was a huge community pub at a time when pubs really were - with respect to London’s many excellent modern pubs - the heart of city life, when London was a pub city. It was built for the new Downham Estate, which began construction 100 years ago this year, and as such was part of the most dramatic geographical change that London has ever seen. 

That seems as good an excuse as any to write about it. Over the next few months I’m going to take a look at this remarkable lost pub, hopefully teasing out some of the ways in which it reflected the evolving nature of London life, and how the gradual ebbing of our need for pubs has changed their value and meaning to subsequent generations. We’ll see. 

There are lots of places to begin this story - from a muddy field at the very edge of London to County Hall - but perhaps the best is in Bromley’s Magistrates Court.

‘The Social Life of the Estate will be Centred on Licensed Premises’

By 1927, the residents of the Downham estate were getting tetchy. They were glad to have left behind decay and squalor in Bermondsey and Deptford and Rotherhithe, and to have found space and light and a view of open country. But they missed one thing: pubs. A huge one, The Fellowship, had opened in 1924 on the nearby estate at Bellingham, and the London County Council had promised them one, too. So where was it?

Sir Coles Child, Baronet, Lord of the Manors of Bromley, East Farleigh and East Peckham, was unmoved. As Bromley’s presiding justice, he denied Barclay Perkins’ 1927 application to build a new pub, the Welcome Tavern, on a site adjoining Burnt Ash Lane, at the southern tip of the new estate. By this time there were more than 1800 homes on the estate, with 1400 in the process of going up and a further 2000+ to follow, but it made no difference. There was no welcome here for the Welcome Tavern.

This was presumably not a complete surprise for Barclay Perkins, then one of London’s biggest breweries. A year before they had been told there were not enough people to justify a pub in Downham; now they were being told it wasn’t in the right place (it’s perhaps not coincidental that Bromley’s ‘class wall’, dividing leafy Bromley from working-class Downham, went up nearby in 1926). 

In 1928, they got all their ducks in a row. In the era of the improved pub (for more on this, see/buy Boak & Bailey’s 20th Century Pub), this was to be the most improved of the lot. Crucially, it was not in Bromley, but at the heart of the estate to the north, and therefore under the auspices of Blackheath’s Justices. Cecil Whiteley, King’s Counsel, speaking for Barclay Perkins, set out the prospectus: an acre site was to include huge saloon and public bars, a concert hall, a tea room and creche, a garden and a separate off-licence, where “wines would be sold by bottle only.” The focus was on selling food and non-alcoholic drinks as much as beer. To that end, there would be no counters and no bar in the pub section. Drinks would be poured out of public view and served to the customer at their table.

Not everyone was convinced by Barclay Perkins’ efforts to appease respectable sentiment. The Reverend EF Edge-Partington, Vicar of nearby St John’s, spoke against the application. “The social life of this estate has hardly begun,” he pleaded, “and Barclay Perkins [are already aiming] to control it. If the premises are accepted the social life of the estate will be centred on [these] licensed premises. This is distinctly unwise.” 

Unwise or not, the plans were approved and, by June 1930, local worthies were sitting down with brewery bigwigs at the pub’s official launch to congratulate themselves on a job well done. The local paper, the Lewisham Borough News, reported that “An ideal public house was in the minds of Messrs Barclay, Perkins & Co when they built the Downham Tavern, and how near they have come was shown on Thursday.” 

Multiple speeches were made, but perhaps it was Councillor Beatrice Drapper, Deptford’s socialist mayor, who (having praised the affordability of food at the Downham Tavern: pies and chops, fish and chips, Welsh rarebit, even roast chicken or steak) summed up the general feeling. “I am satisfied,” she said, “that here [people] can come and spend their evenings on equality with the London clubs.” The future of the Downham Tavern looked very bright indeed.

Do you remember the original Downham Tavern? Get in touch at londonbeercity@gmail.com

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Bridges to Babylon

I was a bit cynical about Brew LDN’s move to Between The Bridges on the South Bank from Printworks, and for good reason: it was clearly a downgrade size-wise, despite being sold as “the UK’s largest beer festival”. (There seemed to be plenty of competition tickets going around in the week or two before the event, as well.) That said, though, the smaller site suited the festival, ensuring a much better atmosphere than cavernous Printworks, even if a lot of the breweries there were not quite A-List.

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New Brews, Please

Next weekend sees the first Spring Beer Festival at Wimbledon Brewery, with plenty of interesting and rare beers on offer - including some made by Cantillon, 3 Fonteinen, Schneider and Cloudwater. There’ll also be Wimbledon’s own 2019 Vintage Ale, matured for 2 years in Speyside whisky barrels before being blended with running beer and bottle-conditioned for five years.

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Summer of Schloss

Manchester’s Germanic behemoth Albert’s Schloss will land in the West End this July, it’s been revealed. Also soon to open in the West End - if Twitter is to be believed - is a new site from Bloomsbury Leisure, The Stranded Bear. 

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Two Pubs, One City

The Parakeet, Kentish Town, and The Tamil Crown, Islington

A dog is sniffing my leg. I’m standing at the bar at the Parakeet, a gastropub in Kentish Town, in brief beer-related discussion with the bar-lady, and I can feel its cold nose through my trouser leg. I turn and look. It’s an XL Bully.

I didn’t intend to turn this edition of London Beer City into an XL Bully Special, but here we are. Honestly, there are loads of them about. I see them in the street. I avoid them in the park. I take an involuntary leap back when one sniffs my leg in the pub.

I can’t say, though, that I wasn’t warned. When Jay Rayner, London king of restaurant grub, reviewed The Parakeet for The Observer recently, he commented on the potential issues of allowing dogs into a place where people are eating. I was on the fence about that - I like dogs AND eating - but I was imagining something a bit more bourgeois, like a Jack Russell. I genuinely think it would put me off my steak if an XL Bully was staring at me (‘ruff ruff you’re next’).

Anyway, on this occasion I avoid getting eaten. Having paid for my pint, I retire to a seat significantly distant from the dog to give me a reasonable head start, should it be needed. I take in my surroundings. They’re nice surroundings. The Parakeet is very green - many shades of green - and it has a delightful etched glass back bar. Chefs, preparing themselves for that night’s service, buzz here and there with big metal dishes, looking purposeful and tattooed. 

In the corner a group of three friends are chatting about the value of stress in terms of having a successful life. They all agree you need it to achieve anything, and the way they’re discussing the topic suggests to me they’re trying to demonstrate to each other just how successful/stress-ridden each of them is. They welcome the stress! They love it!

As gastros go, this is a pretty drinker-friendly boozer. The dining room is tucked away at the back, leaving a big chunk for liquid lunchers. And the beer (Hammerton N1, £5.50) is pretty good. Not superb, but very drinkable. Gastropubs have become quite decent places for cask beer - especially when, as here, the keg is so unimaginative.

There’s a bus between me and my next pub, The Tamil Crown, and I’m looking forward to the experience. ‘No better way to get to know London than on the bus!’ is the sort of thing I say to tourists, or would if I ever spoke to them. 

It’s the 214, and it arrives quickly. Onboard, it’s the usual scene of amusement, aggravation and begrudgery. A couple of schoolgirls give up their standing space in the buggy section when a mum gets on with a screaming tot. At the back of the bus, a dad is trying to explain to two boys the potential title race ramifications after Arsenal’s huge victory over Chelsea the night before. ‘But what if City lose every game 5-0?’ ‘I just explained that a minute ago, were you not listening?’ he responds, tetchily. I know the feeling.

I get off at the Angel and a short walk takes me to the Tamil Crown. This used to be the Charles Lamb, a beauty of a back-streeter, a great place to escape the hubbub of Islington. Did it have French food? I think maybe it did.

Now it’s Indian grub, which - having visited before - I can recommend, particularly the Bhaji (see image). Trust me. Today I’m just having a pint, Purity Gold (£6.20; a bit uppish even if, like black cabs, ale in gastropubs doesn't seem so expensive now everything is expensive), which is about as good as Purity beer ever is - ie decent but not life-changing. Boring but not in a nice traditional way. 

It’s a decent place for a sit-down, what with its shabby-chic, plants and armchairs vibe, but I do think it was nicer before. Oh well - at least it’s still a pub. Better gastro than flats.

There’s a couple of groups in the restaurant, and one of them has a dog, a spaniel-cross. It keeps barking, sharp little woofs every minute or so; eventually its exasperated owner says, ‘stop it or I’ll take you home.’ As if it gives a shit! I don’t either. I fancy my chances should this particular hound try it on. 

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading!

A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by Will Hawkes

Enjoy London Beer City? Support it here 

Kick Off

Two untidy piles of football scarves sit by the door at The Volley, London’s soon-to-be new football pub. One is a mishmash of colours representing different clubs and nations - Scotland, Rapid Vienna, a silky 1980s Roma effort - and the other is almost entirely green and white, the colours of Celtic FC. 

Mark Hislop, co-founder and Rangers supporter, points to the second pile. “Do you know anybody who might want these?” he says with mock exasperation. “I’m not putting all of them up on the wall.” He pauses. “I’ll put one up.”

You can’t say fairer than that - and for London’s football fans, drawn from a hundred different traditions, The Volley might prove an equally equitable proposal. With 13 screens (two of them huge projector efforts) and a commitment to good beer, it’s a (perhaps surprisingly) new concept for the capital - only Feed The Yak, Elephant and Castle’s impressive little bar/bottle shop comes close, but it’s not on the same scale.

Then again, football and decent beer have a complicated history here. It’s not hard to find a good pint near the grounds of London’s 13 professional clubs, but inside it’s often a different proposition. Tottenham, of course, has a Beavertown brewery inside whatever it is they call White Hart Lane now, and elsewhere things have improved a little, but not much. Beer at a London match generally means expensive pints of big-brand lager.

It’s odd, since there is a huge amount of crossover between good beer and football of all kinds. The Volley, according to Mark, will bridge the divide. The house beers (including Oranje, a hazy IPA) will be made by contract brewer Match Day Brewery, whose director, Charlie Hood, is part of The Volley team. These beers will include a collaboration with Deja. The rest of the line-up will be made up of beers from “our favourite London breweries”, says Mark - including The Kernel, Pretty Decent, and Hackney for starters - and something German, possibly Ayinger.

That’s not all. The Volley will also be home to one of London’s vanishingly few Tennents taps, alongside The Scottish Stores in King’s Cross and the nearby Wenlock Arms. “I think this will be the only place in London where you’ll be able to drink Tennents and watch Scottish football, which is the holy grail,” says Mark with a chuckle.

Not just Scottish football, though. The beauty of London is that there are supporters of virtually every club on the planet here, Mark says. “We’ve been speaking to the Inter Milan supporters club, and they seem like nice guys - we’re going to try and host them for a few games,” he says. “We’re going to try and do the same for German football, too.” Men’s and women’s football will be shown, he says.

Reading between the lines, it appears the concept was born out of frustration. “I’m a Rangers fan, and [co-founder Tom Boulton] is a Stoke fan, and the number of times one of our teams has been playing but there’s a big [Premier League] game on, there’s no chance of seeing it,” Mark (below left) says. “We’re going to make sure we’ve always got a screen showing the wee guys.”

This is not Mark’s first attempt to shake up London’s beer market. Having begun his career at Blackfriars pub in Glasgow, he was one of a four-person team that set up Five Miles, a nightclub and brewery in Tottenham. That evolved, after a fashion, into Hale Brewery, which became Exale a while later. Mark was working there until recently. 

The Volley is housed on a site (in The Bower, a large mixed development which opened in 2015) with a strong recent beer tradition: it was originally Draft House Old Street before evolving into a Brewdog bar - for a (very short) while, indeed, it was their much-touted alcohol-free bar. The Volley is subletting from Brewdog, who, Mark says, got in touch because they were keen to help smaller companies that might not be able to afford the rent at places like these. “That was pretty nice of them,” he says.

One of the site’s advantages is its proximity to a number of excellent craft-beer-focused pubs: the Old Fountain at the end of the road, The Wenlock, The Griffin in Shoreditch and, slightly further afield, Clerkenwell’s mighty Sutton Arms. A great crawl, particularly if you like football.

Food will come from Twisted, a food brand with a huge instagram following, who’ll initially be providing burgers while a football-themed sandwich menu is developed - ‘Sandwich Goals’, with different chefs producing sandwiches inspired by famous stadiums and teams. Decoration is iconic football images, carpet on a section in front of one of the big screens - for that authentic pub feel, and all those scarves, including (see if you can spot it) one from Celtic. Kick off is fast approaching. 

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Midnight Flit

A depressingly familiar story from The Ravensbourne Arms, a closed pub in Lewisham. The owners - Ravensbourne Arms Ltd -  have announced plans to turn it into four flats, claiming that “no offer has been made for the site in the last seven years” and that the pub is unviable. In fact, a group called Sister Midnight (which is working to open a community-owned music venue in the borough) very publicly campaigned to buy the pub in 2022, and were told at the time that a better offer had been received. 

As someone who used to drink in the pub when it was run by Antic, my view is that it is viable, particularly if run by a group with the sort of energy shown by Sister Midnight. It would be a real shame to lose it.

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Small Beer

The return of Brew//LDN later this month is interesting for two reasons. It’ll take place on a smaller scale than before, having swapped South London’s massive Printworks for Between The Bridges, a site on the Southbank. That makes sense, because the event struggled to fill Printworks last year. It also looks like the previous owners of Brew//LDN, Chris Bayliss and Daniel Rowntree (who were also behind Craft Beer Rising), have handed over control to Peppermint, which runs Between The Bridges. That’s not clear from the website; when I asked Bayliss about it recently on linkedin, he said that he was “still involved, helping them have a seamless transition.”

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Tribal Parting

Justin Deighton has left Two Tribes, the brewery he co-founded in 2017. Two Tribes is one of the big success stories of London brewing’s second wave, producing a huge amount of beer for a wide variety of outlets. 

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Smart Set

It’s been a big few months for animals in South London pubs. First Frances Bacon, the pig that lived at The Conquering Hero in Upper Norwood, died; now a pub called The Red Setter has been opened in Battersea, with red setters at the launch event. 

Meanwhile, the London Beer Dispensary in Crofton Park has reopened after a spruce-up; as has The Union Tavern in Westbourne Park, including new covering for the outdoor area abutting the canal. 

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Two Pubs, One City

Dacre Arms, SE13, and Duke of Edinburgh, SE12

Inside the Dacre Arms it’s bedlam, albeit of a congenial sort. There’s loud music - Lover’s Rock and soul, Silly Games and This Old Heart of Mine - courtesy of DJ Deano, whose decks, a complex tangle of wires and tables, are facing the front door. At the bar there’s a football team, Dacre Arms on their shirts, drinking shots and talking loudly. On the big telly at the back, Arsenal are playing Manchester City in a crucial title crunch contest. Every seat is taken - more or less - and people are gleeful, smiling and cracking jokes, singing along, Demob-happy.

It’s just before 6pm on Easter Sunday and tomorrow is a day off. If you’re going to go to the pub, today’s the day. All the fun with none of the repercussions, or at least none of the serious ones. It’s no wonder that at this moment The Dacre Arms, a handsome back-street boozer of the old school, feels like an idealised version of the pub.

I squeeze through the crowd at the bar and get a pint of Proper Job (£6). It’s superb. From the bar, I spot a seat in front of the decks, where an older couple is sitting. With a mixture of sign language and pointing, I establish that the seat across from them is free, and I sit down.

It’s loud so I can’t really chat to them, though. There’s plenty to look at: Toby Jugs, a deep red, richly decorated carpet, a sign over the fireplace declaring The Dacre Arms to be ‘cask ale specialists’. Deano brings the couple a round of drinks, before a signal from the bar leads to thirty seconds of Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’, with the football team singing along. 

A younger woman comes in and greets the older couple, and I take it as my sign to go. The woman insists I can stay - but my pint is finished and, anyway, it’s too loud in here to do anything but grin gormlessly. It's a moment suited to groups of pals rather than lone nerds escaping for a pint after Sunday Lunch.

10 minutes’ walk from The Dacre Arms brings you to the Duke of Edinburgh, another good-looking pub. This is Lee, a neighbourhood south of Lewisham once known for pubs, but most are shut now. Nearby, the Old Tiger’s Head clings on (although, as that CAMRA page wryly notes, it is “often found in dark well into the evening”) while the New Tiger’s Head - an extremely handsome structure - is now a food shop. The saddest site is probably the former Woodman, which still has marvellous detail at the top and along the side of the facade.

Inside the Duke of Edinburgh, happily, it’s busy. Everyone is watching two big screens where the final moments of Sunday’s massive (but rather dull) match are playing out. Like The Dacre, this is a community pub: a coat stand near the door heaves under the weight of outerwear, and there are bags with Twirl Easter Eggs - presumably bought for delivery later - stashed at the bottom. 

There’s no cask ale - the pumps are in beautiful shape, but not in operation - so I go for Guinness (£4.50; this beer is either £4.50 or about £7 in this city. Nothing in between) and find a seat. I’m close to a group of nervous young Arsenal fans (‘We’ll take the point bro,” one says to the others as Arsenal see the game out at 0-0), who all leave as the final whistle blows. A small dog decides this is the perfect time to start woofing.

I take one of the seats vacated at the bar. The landlord - I’m presuming it's the landlord - is a tidy, busy man and he keeps a tidy pub. Compared to the Dacre, it’s a bit short of decoration and lushness - no booths here - but there’s bits and bobs, including Six Nations-related flags hanging from the ceiling in the small, tablet-shaped bar.

It’s just regulars now, joshing about a night out (“I thought we might have Morley’s”, one suggests). It’s a nice atmosphere in which to finish off my beer, calm and easy-going and, in its own way, just as enjoyable as bedlam at the Dacre. 

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading! 

A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by Will Hawkes

Enjoy London Beer City? Support it here 

Message In A Bottle  

It’s raining in East Dulwich, which seems a bit much given the property prices. At Hop, Burns and Black, the neighbourhood’s excellent bottle shop, manager Nathan Taylor is stationed by the espresso machine, serving up delicious coffee and genial cheer through the shop’s hatch to any Dulwich and Peckham folk brave or foolhardy enough to be out and about on a day like this. 

The weather might not agree, but this is a time of celebration for Hop, Burns and Black. This year marks its 10th birthday - to be marked by a series of collaborations with their favourite booze producers -  and in that respect it’s not alone. 2014 was a big year for bottle shops in London. Clapton Craft, Mother Kelly’s, We Brought Beer and Bottledog all emerged at much the same time, joining long-established Kris Wines and Utobeer in offering Londoners high-class beer for drinking at home. 

It’s hard to imagine now, but this was a time of huge optimism in the beer world. Lots of breweries opened, bars too. There was a sense that beer as we knew it was changing - and it has, although perhaps not in the way that many imagined 10 years ago. “It was a very idealistic time,” says Jen Ferguson, who co-owns HB&B with partner Glenn Williams. “Almost utopian.”

Plenty saw bottle shops as the next step in craft beer’s inevitable takeover of the world. Nigel Owen, founder of Mother Kelly’s, was inspired on a trip to New York; Tom McKim, co-founder of Clapton Craft alongside fellow Kiwi Will Jack, saw how popular beer had become at Borough Wines, where they both worked, and thought the time was ripe for beer-focused shops. 

What is interesting about bottle shops - beyond the produce - is the way in which they’ve tracked the evolution of beer in London. The rise and fall of 75cl bottled beer; the domination of hops, then and now; the impact of Covid-19; the gradual demise of growlers, or flagons; the arrival of natural wine; and much more besides. If you want to know how beer has changed since 2014, ask someone who runs one of these places. 

In one key sense, HB&B was ahead of the curve. A diverse offering - beer, hot sauce and vinyl - was its offer right from the start. Other bottle shops, from Clapton Craft to Brockley’s Salthouse Bottles, have gradually added other products having started out very much beer-focused. “At the beginning, people would walk in and go ‘this is a strange mix,” laughs Glenn - but the key components remain, even if vinyl was replaced by coffee during Covid. Hot sauce has never been more popular.

The same can’t really be said of beer. As a proportion of HB&B’s turnover, it has fallen from 80 percent in 2014 to 43 percent now. Wine is now about 30 percent of Clapton Craft’s sales, having started at 0. For Mother Kelly’s, which closed its two bottle-shop-only sites in 2022, Covid-19 made a big difference. “We’ve seen our bottled beer, to drink in and takeaway, just disappear,” he says. “We’ve gone from 100 to 150 cases a week to about 10 cases a week now.”

Mother Kelly’s flagship sites always had draught beer to drink on-site; for Clapton Craft, which has nine shops and a significant online offering, that has become a more and more key part of the offering. Its Kentish Town and Finsbury Park sites are currently being updated, meaning six sites will have on-site drinking. “That’s been the biggest pivot for us in the last year or so,” says Tom.

For all three places - and notwithstanding Mother Kelly’s two closed bottle shops - the key thing is they’re still going; thriving, even. Plenty of others aren’t, like Bottledog, Brewdog’s ‘me-too’ bottle-shop concept, abandoned in 2017. It’s hard now to remember the excitement and media attention that greeted Clapton Craft’s opening in 2014, for example. There was a huge buzz, a buzz fuelled (and it seems odd to say this now) at least partly by excitement over its flagon/growler filler.

Flagons are still around, just, but much less prevalent than they were, for taxation and ease-of-use reasons. It’s not the only thing that’s died away: 2014 was a time of beer tourism in London, with bottle shops as key stop-off points. That seems less prevalent now.

But flagons and tourists are not the only endangered species. Part of the excitement in 2014 was a sense that big-format beer, 75cl bottles and the like, pricey and in-demand, a bit like wine, were going to be a big part of the future. It just hasn’t worked out like that. 

Covid-19 is obviously one reason, but the culture has shifted away from the idea. Maybe British drinkers are just allergic to high-falutin’ stuff like this? Maybe it could come back, if and when the economy recovers? Who knows? “That has stayed a much smaller part of the market than I would have predicted,” says Tom. “The Pandemic put a massive stop to that,” says Glenn. 

Beer culture in London has changed: people want cosy pubs, and reliable, not-too-fancy pints. Mother Kelly’s, says Nigel, sells twice as much pale ale and lager as it did pre-Pandemic. 

And the craft-beer drinker changed, too - although perhaps it’s better to say, he or she got older. At Hop, Burns and Black, Jen says, they’ve always worked with an imaginary customer, 'Quinton', in mind. “He’s not that Pokemon, gotta catch them all character any more,” Jen says. “It’s more rounded. Everyone has grown and matured a bit.”

Some things don’t change. Hops are still central, even if the arrival of hazy beer marked a seismic shift and the big brands have changed, thanks to takeovers: from Beavertown to Brick to whoever comes next, in the case of HB&B. American beer has virtually disappeared. 

Despite the challenges - and the rain falling increasingly insistently outside the shop on that February morning - there’s plenty of optimism at HB&B. They’re not alone in that. Last year was difficult, but there’s still lots to be optimistic about. “There’s not the same obsessiveness with beer [as we used to see],” says Jen, “but there’s still plenty of interest out there.”

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Celebrate Mother Kelly’s Birthday (with me)

Mother Kelly’s birthday celebrations next month take in a Q&A and bottle share at their Tottenham stronghold. I’ll be chatting to head honcho Nigel Owen and taking questions from the audience. Tickets are only £10; get yours here.

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Pizza Bad News

We learnt on Wednesday that Meantime was leaving Greenwich, and the brand will now be brewed at Fuller’s in Chiswick. It’s a sad end for a brewery that kick-started London beer's new era in 1999, operating out of a tram shed in one of South-east London’s less glamorous neighbourhoods. At its best - when it was producing delicious Porter in 75cl bottles - it was one of the city’s essential breweries, even if it didn’t quite ever live up to its potential. It never seems to establish a satisfactory brand. (Founder Alastair Hook, btw, remains a director at Gipsy Hill).  

More on Meantime later, except for one tasty morsel: my mole at the meeting when the closure was announced tells me Asahi bosses softened the blow by serving staff pizza before breaking the news. 

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Charlton Tussle

A row over The White Swan, a pub in Charlton, rumbles on. Developers want to turn it into a Tesco; locals want it to be a pub. More here.

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Bermo Beano

Another 10th birthday! Anspach and Hobday will be celebrating its first decade with a party at the Arch House, its original home in Bermondsey, on Friday 22 March. Expect lots of London Black, and look out for the latest iteration of Brother Sean, the brewery’s Belgian Stout.

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New Pubs (And Bars)

Venues continue to emerge (and re-emerge) despite the economic gloom. Yeastie Boys has opened a bar in Hanbury Street; The Greyhound in Peckham will re-open this month after being taken on by some clubbers; and the Roebuck, which has perhaps the best view in all of London, has been renovated and reopened by owners Greene King.  

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Good Tenants

North London’s redoubtable Redemption brewery has taken on the tenancy of the Antwerp Arms, a 170-year-old pub in N17. Redemption - one of modern London brewing’s pioneers having started out in 2010 - has been served at the pub for years. It looks a good fit: a community-focused brewery in a community-owned pub.

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Flying In

Canopy’s former site in Herne Hill is about to be revived as Bird House Brewing. According to Des De Moor, the venue will reopen this month as part of Bird House London, a bar group which operates three venues in the capital. William Hiscocks, trained at Heriot-Watt, will be the brewer.

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Live Fast, Buy Youngs

Youngs has bought the City Pub Group for £162m. The acquisition includes a motley selection of London pubs, including The Cat and Mutton in Broadway Market, The Nell Gwyne (just off Strand) and Temple Brew House.

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Two Pubs, One City

Lord Nelson and Windsor Hotel, Old Kent Road

I was recently taken to task on twitter. South London’s Deserter mentioned January’s newsletter, in which I bravely and provocatively suggested London’s best pubs were quite good - and The Eagle Ale House was not happy. Not happy at all. 

Ha, “nothing to see here, look over there!” The Eagle scoffed. 

“38 Pubs on the Old Kent Rd have closed, but the good news is there’s one left!” #beerbloggergetsexercisedaboutverylittle, it added.

(I was particularly upset about the hashtag.)

But, it did make me think. Just one pub left? How has it managed it? 

And also - I’m sure there are actually two pubs left. 

Which is how I found myself descending from the upper deck of the 172 bus outside the former Thomas a'Becket, perhaps the OKR’s most iconic dead pub, just after lunch on a grey Tuesday afternoon.

I peered through the windows. Inside it’s been cleared away, creating a huge space full of tables, empty, waiting for punters to enjoy what is probably very tasty Thai grub courtesy of the current residents, Viet Quan. Outside, the old pub sign remains, and there’s a plaque devoted to Henry Cooper, the South London boxer who knocked out Cassius Clay and who trained upstairs.

(Cooper’s pubs have not had a good time of it lately. The other that he’s associated with, The Fellowship in Bellingham, is closed again after the latest pubco failed to make it work UPDATE: NOW REOPENED). 

The Lord Nelson is two minutes’ walk south-east along the OKR. Inside it’s remarkable. If you google it, you’ll read about the various Victorian elements, from the odd-shaped bar - like the Stones tongue logo laid flat, projecting into the main room - to the decrepit original mirrors and the screen above the bar, advertising long-gone drinks: champagnes, liquers (sic), ports and sherries.

But they’re just part of the overall scene. There’s also a handful of cabinets filled with Nelson paraphernalia, a fruit machine, a couple of those £1 sweetie machines, a large and almost full bottle on the bar emblazoned “Southwark Irish Pensioners Project”, a floral red carpet, a faux road sign reading “Old Kent Road”, a mish-mash of odd and mostly uncomfortable furniture, a pool table and darts board in the back room, and some silver tinsel behind what looks like a stage area. It’s lived in.

Around the lip-section of the bar sit seven or eight older geezers, chuckling and wheezing, sipping a variety of beers and ciders: lager of one type or another, John Smith’s, Guinness, Strongbow. There’s no cask ale, but the Guinness (£4.50) is - to my uneducated palate - pretty good. Heart FM offers an incongruous soundtrack. It’s like drinking in the nineties.

Being a nosy sort, I'd like to hear what’s being said but there’s work going on upstairs. The high, incessant whine of a drill, then bang bang bang with a hammer, then the drill again. A snippet of chat. “If I’m going to die, I’d rather be fucking warm.” A cackle of laughter from around the pool table at the back. 

The old lads occasionally get up for a piss or a fag.

On the bar is a selection of food: crisps, chips, big chunks of pale beige cheese. Three women are serving behind the bar, and the elder one comes over at one point to put some vinegar on the chips and to have a chat with the customers, who she clearly knows well. I presume she’s Patricia, the landlady, named in a notice on the front window appealing for cash to keep the pub in business. “This has been my home for 50 years,” it reads. “We are in jeopardy of losing the pub due to loss of funds during Covid.” (You can contribute here).

As I leave, the younger woman from behind the bar is on her way out for chat on the phone. We almost run into a customer, another old guy. “Sorry, Alan,” she says. He doesn’t seem to mind.

Between The Lord Nelson and the Windsor, my next port-of-call, is one of the most depressing bits of urban landscape in London, and probably Britain. What’s really dispiriting about this central chunk of the OKR is how ugliness has infected even those structures which aren’t ugly, like the former North Peckham Civic Centre, a stout sixties block on the corner of Peckham Park Road. Imagine the optimism when it opened, and look at it now.

And what’s not ugly is decrepit. The former Kentish Drovers, with its rather timeworn but nonetheless charming tiled exterior depicting some Kentish droving, looks awful. Its most recent occupant, another restaurant, appears to have shut; now it’s just peeling paint, rain-stained awnings and an incongruous Caffrey’s sign. 

It’s a relief to get inside The Windsor. Victorian from the outside, the interior has been stripped bare, so it’s a big, square, somewhat antiseptic room, with seating around the edge, a pool table, lots of TV screens showing horseracing and Sky Sports News. At the far end from the entrance is the bar, at which five men - from middle-aged to quite old, white and black - are sitting and chatting to a friendly woman behind the bar. A Millwall scarf - ‘No One Likes Us’ - hangs behind said bar, close to a sign that reads ‘Pizza and a Pint, £10 all day every day’. 

There are three handpumps, unexpectedly, all of them bearing Doom Bar clips of varying ages. I order a pint (£3.50; in decent nick, malty) and retreat to a corner of the room. 

As I sit down, a Scotsman in a hi-vis jacket enters. He immediately enlivens things, moaning about a shared acquaintance (“It’s bad enough watching cycle racing …”) confirming the details for a forthcoming funeral, concluding an anecdote with the phrase, “He did a big belly flop, fucking soaked every cunt.” 

Like the Lord Nelson, the Windsor is very different to a lot of modern London pubs. The prices are low, the beer is resolutely mainstream, the customers are mostly white and exclusively working-class. The other pubs on the Old Kent Road might have shut - and there were lots of them  - but their culture survives, just about.

About 3pm, most of the other drinkers leave and it’s just the Scotsman and the woman behind the bar. “I’m knackered,” he tells her.

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading!

A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by Will Hawkes

Subscribe for free here

Enjoy London Beer City? Support it here 

How London Pubs conquered Facebook

MARK is drinking Thatchers Cider at a pub in Ruislip. Thomas is lamenting the “long gone” Fountain in Lower Clapton Road. Jon has just been to Kensington’s Churchill Arms (“Nice collection of chamber pots”). An anonymous tied-pub landlord is interested to know what people consider an acceptable price for beer. Tom seeks advice on which two or three pubs to visit in Camden on a flying visit to town. Ian is heading to Twickenham for the rugby, and needs a pub that won’t be too mobbed. Nicky just wants to say what a great group this is.

It’s a busy morning on London Pubs, but then it is a very busy Facebook group. With 139,000 members at the time of writing (it’ll be more by the time you read this), this is a vibrant community of pub-goers, taking in Londoners, ex-Londoners, visitors from around the UK and tourists from all over, particularly the USA, Australia and Scandinavia. Most people here are men - about 70 percent - but, like the best pubs, it’s not overwhelmingly male.

Founded about two-and-a-half years’ ago in the aftermath of Covid-19, its success is testament to the cultural cachet of London pubs. We’re often told that pubs rank somewhere in the top five when it comes to reasons why people visit Britain, but this is tangible, vivid evidence. To peruse London Pubs is to understand the extent to which they are a key part of London, a fundamental element of the city’s culture and of its allure.

Someone who understands this better than most is Mark Dutton, the group’s founder, a 50-year-old Merseysider who lives on a boat chugging up and down the Grand Union Canal. (When we speak he’s in Rickmansworth, just outside the capital, but he’d recently been in Paddington, the canal’s London terminus.) 

He was inspired by a pal who’d founded a similar group for Lincoln, he says. Unlike the Lincoln group, where pub owners post about what’s going on at their venues, the London group is overwhelmingly customer-driven, which is what gives it such energy. People like pubs and they love to share that enjoyment. “It’s about the punters,” Mark says. “That was very important to me, right from the start.”

The group grew quickly, riding a post-lockdown wave of affection for pubs. It has accelerated since: it reached 100,000 members just before Christmas, Mark says. 

It’s easy to understand why it’s popular. There are pictures of beautiful pubs, plenty of heated debate (of which, more later), pubs you know well, pubs you’ve never seen, pubs that are long gone, amusing contributors, angry contributors, even the occasional pub bore - all of pub life is here, even if Mark keeps a tight rein on genuinely obnoxious behaviour. The tone is welcoming but often forthright and always opinionated. “I’m hesitant to use the word ‘banter’, but it has that element to it,” Mark says.

Nostalgia, as you might expect, is a big part of the mix. This is a city of ghosts, and the members’ average age (two thirds are middle-aged or over, Mark says) means there are lots of memories to go around. But it’s not cloying, even if certain pubs are featured more often for questionable historical reasons (The Blind Beggar, for example). 

“It is a strong element,” Mark says. “When I wrote the brief definition, I did put in about the history of pubs - but the future is equally important. It’s great to see historic pubs like The Devonshire and The Tipperary [SEE BELOW] reopening.”

What is particularly fascinating, perhaps, is the subjects that create arguments. Cask ale v lager, for example, or where to find the best pint of Guinness. The price of beer is a constant source of amazement, although anyone who’s been out in town recently is well aware prices have ballooned. Then there’s the cask v card schism, which has a touch of the culture war about it; there are even some posters who say they’d refuse to stay in a pub that didn’t take cash.

“I always try, as much as I can, to keep neutral on stuff like that,” says Mark. “As long as there’s no animosity, and people don’t get abusive, it’s fine by me. We’ve all got our personal preferences.”

One of the great joys is when visitors ask for recommendations, although the volume of responses can be overwhelming. Most come back to report on what they’d experienced. “That’s one of my favourite things, when people from overseas are looking for advice,” Mark says. “Then they post afterwards after their experience, the chain of events. That’s a nice thing. It’s always great to get visitors’ views of our pubs.” 

But where would Mark recommend for a first time visitor to London? The Marquis in Covent Garden, of which more below. It’s got a great landlord, he says, and atmosphere, that key to any good pub. As much as atmosphere can ever be a component of an online community, you could say the same for London Pubs.

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Support Eko!

Eko, November’s Cover Stars, is crowd-funding to buy brewing equipment for its home in Peckham. Click here if you want to support them. 

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Exale Inhale

Walthamstow brewery Exale last week announced that it will no longer sell beer into trade, instead choosing to focus on the company’s two venues and the search for a third, which it hopes to have secured by the end of the year. As part of the restructuring, co-founder Mark Hislop has left the business, although he remains a shareholder. 

As well as highlighting the difficulties smaller breweries face in selling beer into trade (in terms of the associated costs - marketing, etc - and the competition from multinationals’ craft brands, like Beavertown, Camden Town and Brixton), this is another demonstration of how downsizing represents one possible future for smaller London breweries in the face of ‘economic headwinds’. 

There could soon be many more small breweries exclusively (or almost exclusively) servicing a small group of pubs, like Exale or Saint Monday. It's a better option than growing in search of big-brewery investment that no longer exists.

Andy Solley, Hislops’ business partner, has taken on his role as MD. He denies this is a retrenchment (“it’s a remodelling,” he told me) although the brewery will be making perhaps 30 to 40 percent less beer than before. Hislop, who was also responsible for the craft-beer nightclub Five Miles in Tottenham, is set to move onto new projects.

Solley is phlegmatic about the retreat from the free trade. “I can see it from the operators’ view,” he says. “[If] They’ve got a big brewery offering a nice cellar install, and they don’t think their customers will be that bothered about being served Neck Oil rather than our session IPA, then they’re probably going to make the change because financially it stacks up.”

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It’s a Long Wait

One of London’s oldest pubs could soon be back. The Tipperary in Fleet Street, which boasts some of the capital’s most delightful decoration (including a shamrock-festooned mosaic floor) has been closed for about two years - but a group called Dominus Fleet Street Ltd has applied for a licence. Any objections must be registered by Monday evening. 

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It’s An Even Longer Wait

Another revived pub. Grace Land, owner of Saint Monday, is reopening The Duke of St Albans in Highgate, which closed in 2008 and has traded as a restaurant since. According to Grace Land’s co-owner Andreas Akerlund, it should be back in pub mode within the next six to eight weeks. Expect a similar beer experience to the other Grace Land venues, with a wide beer range and regular rotation outside the staple pints. 

More good news for North London pub-lovers: the Lord Southampton in Camden can re-open as a pub after the council approved it last month, despite some quite inventive local opposition. In Charlton, meanwhile, the magnificent, burned-out, long abandoned Victoria has been revived - as a Domino’s takeaway.  

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Old Gold

This weekend offers a unique opportunity to taste some British brewing history at two small-scale festivals (and two great pubs). Wimbledon has, so their instagram account has it, blended a stock ale with a running ale in the 18th-century style to make Nelson’s Blend, which will be available at the St John’s Beer and Cider Festival on Friday and then at the Trafalgar in Wimbledon.

On Saturday and Sunday, meanwhile, The Old Mitre is hosting a festival of beers served from wooden casks. There will be Bass. 

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Quiet Fridays

A year ago, Westminster Council rejected Wetherspoons’ application to convert the former TGI Friday’s in Covent Garden, on the basis of its size and the potential for disturbance it represented. The site, pictured last week, remains empty. 

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Stout Shout

Who likes nitro stout? Everyone, apparently. Luckily for you, I wrote about the current stout-mania in British pubs for Vinepair last week - and you can read it here. 

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Kernel Kiddies

The Kernel, always at the forefront of London brewing innovation, has introduced colouring books at its taproom in Bermondsey (picture taken from instagram). Kids are always welcome, they say, but Wednesdays and Sundays are the quietest times.

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Two Pubs, One City

The Marquis and The Coach and Horses, both Covent Garden

Two women in sensible coats are inspecting the menu pinned outside The Marquis. Is this the place for lunch? They can’t decide. The varied options (Steak and Ale Pie, Fish and Chips, Goat’s Cheese Salad, Kerala Curry, among many others) don’t seem to be helping. “I don’t mind going somewhere else,” one says to the other, uncertain, perhaps unwilling to make a decision that might ruin the day.

I squeeze past to get inside, and they follow as I hold the door open. Sometimes you need that push. 

For me, the push came from Alistair Von Lion, London Pub Explorer and the man behind ‘Support an Independent Pub Day’ which takes place tomorrow, Saturday 10 February. It’s a self-evidently good scheme: independent businesses need support at the moment, what with everything - and, in my experience, they tend to be better than chain venues, too. 

How many independent pubs are there, though, right in the heart of town? Not many. I settle on The Marquis - part of a three-pub chain, true, but independent enough in terms of ownership - and The Coach and Horses, which has been run by the Ryan family for decades. They’re appealingly close together.

The Marquis is one of those pubs that gets regular mentions on London Pubs, and is a favourite of Dutton’s. “It has a great landlord, Tommy [McGuinness],” he says. “He’s warm, welcoming, sharing - he’s put his own stamp on the pub. It’s a friendly place, there’s a good mixed crowd.”

Let’s see. It’s 20 to one and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band is plodding along on the record player behind the bar. There’s a warm welcome, and a surprisingly cold cask beer: Decca Supreme Session Ale (£5.25), made by Portobello Brewing Co in West London (as are three of the four cask ales on offer; the other is Proper Job). It tastes fine, but it’s too cold. 

Over the next 20 minutes, the pub fills up: half suits, half tourists. Soon it’s standing room only. (An hour later there's a crowd out on the street - see above - half Marquis, half Harp.) A lot of keg beer is served, including a pint of lager shandy for an older gent. Which lager? “Any old lager, please.”

That record player is the pub’s key point of difference. Surrounded by vinyl and musical trinkets, mostly Mod-focused, it’s the heart of the bar, rivalled only by a signed Aled Jones seven-inch and some Norwich City stuff. Music reigns here. Only Fools and Horses is on the telly, but it’s muted so as not to compete with ‘When I’m Sixty Four’.

It’s an enjoyable place to while away half an hour, watching people go by. A young man, holding his small daughter’s hand, looks wistfully across the road into the pub. 

The nook I’m in, a sign tells me, has been reserved for Vicki Madgett at 6pm - not wishing to upset Vicki, I finish up. Two middle-aged men, pints of Stella and Mahou, scramble into my spot. “Have you seen Hamilton’s gone to Ferrari?”

Outside, Covent Garden is having a normal one. A teacher stops and turns to address a gaggle of Primary-School kids, warning them not “to be silly”. Some chance. Two old geezers are sitting in the window at Rules. Inside Milk Train, an ice cream shop, a sign reads “Ice Cream Makes You Happy”. Below, behind the counter, a young man sits, his face a picture of disconsolate boredom.

The Coach and Horses is buzzing, inside and out. According to Oisin Rogers of Devonshire fame, this is the only pub in central London apart from his to serve Guinness with more than 80 percent Nitrogen, so that’s what I drink (£6.60). It’s served in the proper glass (ie not the one that looks like a vase), but it’s a bit cold. I appreciate that most people like beer colder than I do, but it’s February for goodness' sake. 

A group of posh lads - trimmed facial hair, zip up jumpers or gilets, those black trainers with white bottoms - stand around a table filled with glasses of Guinness. An older group, beautifully-dressed, are on their way to the bar, walking behind them: “Mind yourself,” one warns in old-fashioned Cockney. A couple sits at one of the central high tables; he’s eating a sausage sandwich with knife and fork, she’s drinking tea. Nearby, a Boston Terrier slumbers noiselessly on the green carpet.

On the walls are pictures of the old Covent Garden market, as it was before it left in 1974. This may be the last pub where you can get a feel for those days, from the salt beef on the hot plate to the paraphernalia, much of it decades old. 

I could stay all day, but I’ve got stuff to do. A big lad, bearded and booted, takes the seat next to mine and I decide to finish up and leave him to it. Sometimes you need that push.

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading!