Pear Cider

Feels odd to be parked in a farmyard, hooting my car’s horn. Rude. Bad-mannered, even. But that’s what the sign says to do.  I’d got lost, as I always do when avoiding the motorway, and made the best of the situation by following a crudely-painted notice for ‘real cider’ that i’d seen on the A358 south of Taunton. A lady appears and beckons me into the barn. “Come far?” she says. “North Devon. I’m on my way back to London”. “Ah, that’s a distance. Would you like to try some? It’s meant to be very good today”. Thinking of the miles still to cover I decline,  wondering what the cider was like yesterday, or will be like tomorrow. The lady taps off 2 litres for me.  ’We’ve been at Ashill for thirty years, and these barrels were at least 30 years old back then. Well, good day to you. Safe journey, now.’

The cider was horrible, by the way. Absolutely reeking of pear drops. Whether it was meant to be like that, I have no idea. They had no shortage of custom, so I’m prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. And just look at that label, it’s a masterpiece.

And Sunday Morning

Bacon sarnies thick as a phone book. Pints of brick-red tea. Spring is properly here. The house this fine morning seems lit from within. A good day for a proper walk.

The first bit of the Olympic Park reopens in July. It’s just down the road from us. Until then our way West is barred by a North Korean-style electric fence. So, we knock the corners off our hangovers with a meander past Westfield, along Stratford High Street and The Greenway. The Carpenters Estate has signs protesting against plans to build a campus for UCL. As always, when an area ‘improves’ someone suffers – usually people who lived there when nobody else would touch the place with a bargepole. Off the Greenway and then along the towpath up the Lee Navigation, and off at White Post Lane. The area is literally unrecognisable from what it was pre-Olympics. All the tyre yards, mountains of scrap and torched cars are gone.  One of the units that was here made those elephant leg doner kebabs. All swept away in a tide of Bright Young Things. Hackney Wick and neighbouring Fish Island – just over the Hertfordshire Union Canal – are the New Shoreditch. We pass Foreman’s, the long-established fish smoker, and are startled by a doorman who seems very keen to invite us in for a look around. The Wick is also home to a couple of breweries. Truman – another exile from E1 – is to be reborn at Stour Road. Another is Crate, in the White Building at the very far side of that Korean fence.

Down the steps to the canalside, a great setting between two bridges. People lolling all over the towpath like seals at Pier 39. Crate is in a typical East London post-industrial unit, smaller than we expected but tall and airy. It opened last july and reviews have been mixed but largely positive, any negatives mainly about the staff or the food. We didn’t try their pizza, and the staff seemed OK. Even the girl limping around with a bleeding kneecap.

Crate’s Lager actually fulfils the promise in the beer menu that it’s got a load more flavour than average. And so it should, at four quid a pop. I still haven’t found my Great British Lager, but this is well on the way to being The One. Really excellent – and if we were sat here on a hot summer evening I’d imagine it would be really, really excellent.

On again. Through lovely Victoria Park where dogs are catching frisbees and sunday league footballers are cursing each other. The trees are in bud, the ocean of grass a dazzling emerald in the early spring light. Over there is the house where Mrs Wheels’ dad and granddad repossessed a Ford Zodiac from Frank ‘The Mad Axeman’ Mitchell (“We just knocked on the door and asked for the keys. Good as gold he was”). Down to the Regents Canal, off again at Broadway Market a mile or so to the North West. As a full-time media ponce and former resident of Shoreditch – let me tell you – i’ve been guilty of some appalling hipsterism in the past. But Broadway Market on a sunday is something else. It looks like hundreds of members of a cult have assembled for an imminent Hipster rapture. Each adherent in the creed uniform of Deidre Barlow specs, neat moustache or King Leonidas beard, chemise breton and tight, rolled-up jeans. And they’ve all arrived on a singlespeed bicycle.

Broadway is where you’ll find the Dove Freehouse, one of the pioneers of interesting beer in London, long before anybody had come up with the moniker ‘craft’. It was the first place I ever tried Duvel. Today, it’s swarming with hipsterati. No room at the inn. We give it the swerve and carry on through London Fields and onto Mare Street, Hackney’s Golden Mile.

Hackney – like Brixton and Camden – is one of those areas of London that provoke  fanatical loyalties. You’ll know when you’ve met someone from Hackney, because it’ll be the first thing they’ll tell you. Perhaps even before you know their name.

The Pembury Tavern sits on a hideous five-way junction just up from Hackney Downs station. It’s a huge, brick brute of a building and it looks more like a town hall than a pub. In my early London days I remember it being a place to avoid, like a lot of local pubs at the time. Surprising, as circa 1990 this was apparently owned by Banks And Taylor and even appeared in the Good Beer Guide. For many years it was derelict, closed after a catastrophic fire in 1996. It reopened as a freehouse ten years later in what was still a real ale desert. The interior is large and echoey. It reminds us of an NUS bar or one of those pubs which serves as anteroom to a music venue out the back. The braying of a tableful clearly the worse for a couple of bottles of wine bounces off every surface. For some reason we shun the 16 or so handpumps and chose Moravka, cool and bland and with all the character of Stella 4. The Pembury clearly has its fans, and it might come into its own of an evening, but we don’t feel the urge to linger longer.

Among the crowd in The Cock Tavern on Mare Street there is a man wearing a fez. Actually, there are two. There’s an old man and his dog. There’s a bloke in a fedora and rhinestone-studded cowboy boots, what look like a group of hare coursers and a couple of characters straight from a certain Viz cartoon strip. We’re lucky to find a table. The interior is postwar utilitarian chic. Glazed tiles, wooden floorboards and the original Truman panelling. There are nice touches like proper, handwritten signs. Bare bulbs light the room, with the ones over the bar covered by workshop-style enamel shades. Knobbly beer mugs, obviously – but it all works without feeling contrived. The Cock is brought to us by the people behind Kentish Town’s Southampton Arms and opened in its current incarnation only last year. There are sixteen handpumps lined up like the Foot Guards at the battle of Waterloo. We counted ten for beer, six for cider and about ten keg fonts round the corner, Kernel’s London Sour among them.

Somewhere in this smallish building they’ve managed to fit in a microbrewery – Howling Hops. The European Pale Ale is standard-issue zesty fruitiness. Great. But the Smoked Porter is in another league. Fresh and punchy, the smokiness comes through instantly, leaving a sort of very pleasant ‘coal tar’ aftertaste. It actually feels like it’s doing you some good. Absolutely the best pint I’ve had so far this year. So good that we stay for another four.

It’s an often valid suspicion that pubs with multiple handpumps can suffer from quality control. From our corner we watched the two barmen take regular samples; sniffing and tasting and lifting the glass to the light. The two blokes never stopped moving. They seemed to know everyone, and everybody in the pub seemed to know everybody else. It’s hard to judge on a single visit, but it certainly gave us the impression that the Cock was already at the heart of this community.

Back home in glittering Leytonstone we were politely turned away by the staff at old favourite The Red Lion. We’d been seduced by a Vietnamese café on the way home and left it too late for a nightcap. Still, Lee and I managed a two-day crawl full of high quality beers in high quality pubs, something that would have been impossible even a couple of years ago.

East London – you’ve come a long way, baby.

Saturday Night.

‘Wow, the landlord’s enthusiastic’, says Lee as we watch the guv’nor of the Birkbeck Tavern stop on his way back from collecting empties to dance with the regulars. Tonight, Donna Hayes is belting out singalong pop to a small but appreciative crowd. A poster behind her announces a forthcoming appearance by Two Fat Men In A Bathtub.

It’s the end of a long day, and the Birk is our last stop. The pub seems to have changed hands again. Whoever the new lot are, they’re keeping their beer well, capitalising on the good work of the previous custodians who’d turned the much-loved but mediocre pub around. I can only manage one more pint – something called ‘Kings’. It might have been from the Horsham Brewery of that name. It’s dry and hoppy. But we’re at the top of seven or eight (nine?) pint ladder. I’ll probably describe Fosters as dry and hoppy.

We’d kicked off at lunchtime in the Holborn Whippet. Koenig Pilsner for me. Breadcrusty and mellow. Redemption Porter for Lee. Coffee caramel. Then a Moor Nor’hop; quenching grapefruit and mango. Totally tropical. This is my second visit to the Whippet, and Lee’s first. All good this time, the barman committing neither of the foul sins that irked me last time, when I was patronised over my choice by a man who then wiped froth from the side of my glass with his podgy fingers. The interior is almost anti-pub but it’s welcoming and unthreatening. It could be a showroom for Scandinavian HiFi. Beer is dispensed from taps on a central island, with the brew names chalked on slates. I want to take the door with the Public Bar window home with me. They do food here – mainly burgers. I’m absolutely certain that their hygiene standards are beyond question, but having seen where their open plan kitchen is – right outside the toilets – i’ll be sticking to beer.

Next: Craft, a ten minute walk away at Leather Lane. This is my old stamping ground, and I’ve visited before and loved it. But today we’re tourists. It’s busy, every seat taken and not much standing room. Young fashioneers with astonishingly neat hair sharing a table with a dandruffed ticker. Magic Rock Curious is a fine whisk of smooth hoppiness. All day drinking stuff. Dark Star Espresso Stout. Black as the earl of Hell’s waistcoat and tastes as robust as it looks. No fancy tasting notes for this – it’s all in the name. Two is enough. Fyne Maverick is all dark bonfire toffee and its brother Vital Spark looks malty but tastes hoppy. There’s flyers up for a 200 quid beer geek quiz. Craft feels properly bedded in now; it could have been open for decades rather than a couple of years.

The wives have told us not to forget to eat. If we don’t eat, we get daft. The shopping trolley incident. Penderel’s Oak for ballast. It’s a Wetherspoon, but a good ‘un. No tracksuit bottoms with shoes here. It’s well-run, clean. The beer is always good. ‘Gourmet’ chicken burger, pimped up for a couple of quid. Washed down with a plastic cider. I like plastic cider – although I won’t be having Stella’s effort again, which tastes like an own-brand Irn Bru.

An early evening walk and The Euston tap is packed. It’s always packed. But it’s always easy to get served. Summer Wine Teleporter is a smoky, 5% thump. Chewy. We’re channelling rauchbeer. Lee’s pint has tiny lumps of – what? sediment? – in it.

Where now then? The days of lock-ins are left to our younger selves. We’ll get off at Leyton. Quick one at the Birkbeck. Tomorrow is another day.

Bright And Dark, Like Ale In A Glass

Here we are, then. Leytonstone’s newest pub. It’s called the Crown, reborn of a full refit from the ashes of the rough and unready Sheepwalk. Very far from being My Sort Of Pub, The Sheepwalk had a sort of perverse cult following among locals, not all of whom were known to the Metropolitan Police. I found myself in there more than once, usually after a long evening at the North Star round the corner. Half-lost nightmares of karaoke hosted by a very short man dressed as Austin Powers. Sweaty lager all over the place and my oddball French neighbour sat in the corner alone, reading a book on copyright law.

All different now. The interior of the Sheepwalk looked as if bits had been stolen over the years, leaving the husk of a once-grand pub. The new owners have made the most of the remaining original features, though the rest of the interior is from the Big Book Of Innoffensive Inns.  It’s dark mahogany and comfy patterned cushions and stripped wooden floors. Walking in on this saturday lunchtime it still smells new. MTV looks down from large screens, sound off. Four blokes at the bar laughing themselves inside out about someone ‘falling in the shitter’. Battalions of chrome lager and cider taps, three proper handpumps, one unclipped. Doom Bore and London Pride. Nothing to scare the horses. When did I last have a Pride? Can’t remember. The middle-aged barman heaves on the pump, squeezing out a sparkled pint. It’s got a haze. Unbidden, he lifts it to the light and squints. ‘Hmm. Not happy with that. Just a moment’. He nips down the cellar, comes back and pours again. We watch the new pint settle.  ’Much better.’ he says quietly. I like this man.

‘Brown’ beers don’t come much browner than London Pride. But who wants a hop bomb in every pint? Not me. It’s a beer for its own sake. Easy drinking. Rounded hops and malt. As balanced as Philippe Petit. Unthreatening as Alan Titchmarsh. Food’s the thing here, really. Menu and wine list on the table, next to a little goldfish bowl with a Chrysanthemum floating in it. £6.95 for a roast. You’d bring your auntie here. You wouldn’t have taken her to the Sheepwalk.

50 yards away at the Walnut Tree a pint of Pride is nearly a quid cheaper. I go for East London Brewery’s Foundation, brewed up the road on the Hackney/Leyton frontier. Dry and tangy. I went to a talk by ELB’s Stuart Lacelles last year. He was a one-man operation, clearly tired but in love with his work. It shows in his beer. I’m in here because I want to see if the place has improved since my last visit about three years ago. On that occasion it was full of large vomity drunks in stained white vests shouting about dogs. Today’s drinkers are better behaved and my feet don’t seem to be sticking to the carpet. Pensioners and groups of friends sipping quietly, empty tables cluttered with dead glasses. Things look better than before, but as with most Wetherspoons I don’t feel the need to take my coat off. Horse racing is on the TV, lending the ambience of a betting shop that serves alcohol. Some of these punters must be refugees from the Sheepwalk, which was the last local redoubt of the type of drinker who spends his day nursing a lukewarm pint over a copy of the Racing Post. If the Crown is now the saloon, the Walnut Tree is its public bar.

I’m down the road in the Red Lion. This place needs to get some sort of civic award for how it’s revitalised the area. It’s the clubhouse for E11 diehards and young gentrifiers.   Busiest pub I’ve been in today and easy to see why. Relaxed and welcoming with a could-be-in-Blankenberge whiff coming from the pots of mussels being carried out from the kitchen.  Marble Draft is a big faceful of hops. Only 3.9% but feels a lot heavier. I could stay here all day. The Red Lion will soon have a cocktail bar. A cocktail bar. In Leytonstone. Ten years ago this was a place where you struggled to get a decent coffee and Tesco’s bananas were in the exotic fruit aisle.

Warning: May Contain Knees-Up

Until the advent of the internal combustion engine, the bells of St Mary Le Bow (in Cheapside EC2) could be heard five or so miles away in Leyton and Stratford. Despite the purists who claim that the East End finishes at the Bow Flyover, the denizens of E10, E15 (and now E20) are bona-fide Cockneys.

Last sunday we walked into the Birkbeck Tavern, and found ourselves being entertained by a bevy (an oyster?) of uber-Cockneys; Pearly Kings And Queens.

Incredible how far these immortal old songs have burrowed into the nation’s consciousness; I found myself singing along to The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo without even realising I knew the words, although I was stumped by a ditty that contained the line ‘Git yer ‘ands orf me bristols’. Have a banana.

This Melancholy London

Scenes from a winter commute.

 

Technical details: HTC Desire S Mobile Phone. Images processed by Instagram.

Hibernation and Reincarnation

Call me the blogger of doom. The Lord Rookwood on Leytonstone’s Cann Hall Road – as mentioned in my last post – has shut. Very suddenly and without warning.

The Rookwood opened in 1893 to serve the rows of characteristic London terraces that were being constructed nearby. These streets became home to the aspirational working classes from the ‘real’ East End. Leytonstone was where you went if you’d saved a few quid and wanted a better life than your parents and grandparents. The 1901 census for our road reveals that almost every resident had moved there from Bethnal Green or Stepney, and all (unlike their forebears) had ‘clean’ trades; typically dressmakers, bookkeepers or clerks down at the docks or in the City. The Rookwood was probably a very smart pub in its day. The outside is a handsome mash of high Victorian and ‘brewers Tudor’  and although the L-shaped interior was a symphony in cack-handed 70s and 80s refits, someone had the good sense to keep the fine etched windows and glazed brickwork. It was never first choice as a bolthole, having one lonely pump of ‘brown’ beer – usually Directors or London Pride – but it was a good place to drop by if you fancied a short walk for a long lager or three. The regulars and staff were a friendly bunch who’d make an effort to draw a stranger into their conversations and there was always someone wanting a game of pool, if you like that sort of thing. Latest rumour is that the area manager for Enterprise Inns considers The Rookwood to be viable and it could reopen in six or seven weeks after some mysterious ‘legal issues’ have been resolved.

Cann Hall Road’s other pub was the Colegrave, currently being converted into a mosque. This was built around the same time as the Rookwood and for the same reasons. It was a fairly big ol’ place, with an interior that was on CAMRA’s Heritage Pub Regional Inventory:

“A rare example of an intact refit from the 1950s or possibly early 1960s, a time when pubs still went in for multiple rooms of differing character. At the front a public bar and more intimate panelled snug served from the original counter and bar-back (note the Charrington advertising). Behind a vast lounge with wall panelling.”

Which sounds lovely. And I’m sure it was, once. I’m told I went in twice, neither occasion registering with me at all. In latter days it had become very run down, changing tenants several times until the East London Pub Company put it out of its misery about 3 years ago. Sometimes a building needs saving from a pub in order to survive. Certainly, under the new owners the place is looking happier than it has done for many years. Before the new signs went up these wonderfully preserved 30s-era Charringtons tiles were visible for the first time in decades – a nice last hurrah for the old pub.

And So It Goes.

This mournful building is – or was – The Woodhouse Tavern in Leytonstone’s Harrow Road. It’s been there about 150 years, and the unusual configuration of the building is due in large part to a near-direct hit during The Blitz. It closed with barely a murmur just before Christmas – I think it did, anyway.  It could have been closed for six months for all the impact it’s had. Compare the passing of this place with the nearby Birkbeck Tavern, which had locals a-froth about its potential closure and conversion to flats, a threat which they successfully fought off.

The landlord of the Woodhouse was in the local paper back in 2010 saying that he couldn’t go on much longer and that he was in talks to sell the place to a housing association. It looks like he has thrown in the towel, but the local council have just chucked out the association’s application to demolish the pub – one reason being that it would mean ‘the loss of a public house’. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

I must have been in the Woodhouse about three times, each visit more underwhelming than the last. It was perfectly friendly and perfectly clean. A run-of-the-mill East London boozer, really. But it sold only very ordinary drinks that were far, far cheaper to consume at home. There was no real ale – on our first visit the barmaid informed my incredulous dad that the handpumps were ‘just there for decoration’. On our last visit (about two years ago) we were the only punters – at 8pm on a saturday night. There would have been more atmosphere swigging a can of Fosters in a bus shelter. There were (and are) much better places to spend my hard-earned. I’m a card-carrying beer nerd, but i’m perfectly happy to drink Lout if the pub’s worth visiting – a case in point being the Lord Rookwood round the corner from the Woodhouse, and the nearest pub to Ten-Inch Villas. It’s another standard-issue East End battlecruiser, but what it lacks in nerd-pleasing ales it makes up with a welcoming atmosphere and the added-value of an occasional comedy club and even a world-renowned weekly jazz night.

Pubs. Use them or lose them. If they’re worth using.

Bleeding Hops

I’m ten minutes early for our office Christmas dinner. Better have a drink while I wait, then.

Call me old fashioned, but if you have three handpumps on your bar you should expect that at some point someone will order a beer. The last time I was in the Bleeding Heart – admittedly some years ago – it was still more pub than restaurant, with a decent collection of Belgian bottles if I recall. It’s now one of those pubs that is more restaurant than pub, even if it still looks like one.

“Pint of Broadside, please”

“A cideeer?”

“Broadside, please”

“Cideeer?”

“No, Broadside, please. BROAD SIDE.”

The manager scampers to the rescue, brushing the waitress-cum-barmaid aside after she finally pours my beer. French, smiling and sharp-suited he takes my payment and transfers my pint – dangled between two fingers like a soiled tissue – to the only table without a menu on it. By the baffled reaction, you’d think I’d walked into a butchers shop and ordered a bowling ball. Of the three pumps, one is naked and one – weirdly – has a clip for Bitburger Pils. I’m tempted to ask but I already feel like a character in a HM Bateman cartoon, so I resist.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Broadside was as good as any I’ve ever had. Later, a couplathree more pints washed down an excellent game terrine and a braised steak.

Afterwards we ended up in the Betsey Trotwood, a pub I’ve never taken to – though I’ve seen a lot of bands there over the years. Service was indifferent and so was the beer –  Christmas Ale and Late Red both had a dry, ‘dusty’ and slightly sour aftertaste. No lacing, and flat as a pancake with a quarter of the glass left. A better pint in a restaurant than a pub? That’s London drinking for you – unpredictable.

I’d left the camera at home, so the photo is of Southwold – home of Adnams – as seen from the magnificent pier.

Gained One, Lost One

A quick post to say that The Crown – ex Sheepwalk – reopens tonight after a six-week refurb by mysterious owners the Tommy Flynn Group. A quick squint through the windows this morning revealed a completely new interior which seems to have come from the JD Wetherspoon pattern book. Three handpumps on the bar though, which is heartening.  I’ll try and get in for a review over the next week or so. Meanwhile, this is all that’s left of Lincoln’s, which at one time was Leytonstone’s scariest boozer, a title passed on to the Sheepwalk when Lincoln’s was closed by the local police.

I never got around to taking a pic of the blighted establishment, but it looked like this, a handsome building which survived several near-misses during The Blitz and enjoyed a fond-rembered heyday as The Elms before finally starting a long decline in the 80s. Full of asbestos and rot apparently, so down it came. The site is earmarked for affordable housing, though ‘affordable’ is a highly relative term in gentrifying Leytonstone.