Photograph Phil Hall

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From the Lamb & Flag to the Red Lion (with Anthony)

by Phil Hall

This is the story of a pub crawl. The first pub I remember going to was the Barley Mow near Abingdon; they let children in, and sometimes we were allowed to drink shandy—lemonade with a little beer. When you go on a long walk in England, the best thing that can happen to you when you’re tired and thirsty is to come to a village and see the sign of a pub outside. Perfect. A pub wouldn’t have a high ceiling. The pub would have a wooden floor, wooden furniture, a fireplace, and a wooden counter with draught cider and beer behind it: bitter, ale, porter. And you must order a whole pint if you are thirsty and gulp it down. Then order another.

The second drink you nurse and sip, and as you do you relax, and if you have a companion you start to chat. To stand at the bar means you’ll probably exchange a few words with the barman or the barmaid serving, and ask them about the pub and the place and the beer. But what you can also do is slope off into some corner and sit around a table.

If there isn’t a TV with football or rugby or cricket, you can hear yourself talk. Most probably you’ll be meeting up with an old friend and so there’ll be lots to say, but you could go in with your wife, your partner your mates from work.

When you catch up with your friends you talk about everything: the dire state of the Labour Party and its betrayals of the working class, history, shared interests, music, sport, whatever. And the more you drink, the more the conversation flows. Then it’s time for another round, and you take turns, and the conversation gets better and better until about the fourth pint, and then it takes a slight turn for the worse. It’s recommended that you stay on the same drink.

In England in the 60s and 70s the pubs were taken over by the big breweries like Watney’s and Greene King. When I was young they tried to make people drink something called Double Diamond, which was just a mild acid. But one of my first memories is wandering through a traveller’s camp near Abingdon and smelling the Morland Brewery at work, now famous for its Old Speckled Hen. And because it brought back memories, I wrote a poem to the Morland Brewery and their beer:

The Tuns of Abingdon

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A pile of wet seeds

Honey stolen from the bees

Precious sticky liquid

Wrapped in leaves

Fermenting . . .

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Swallowed anyway.

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There is beauty in drinking the rot

In the disassembly of time and light

And in the decomposition of the hard into the soft

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There is beauty in the rot

Swill so supped is never forgot

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So that after the hunting and killing

Of deer, rabbits, distracted birds

And after all that pain and blood and froth

It was necessary to dance and cry

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And draw careful paintings on cave walls

To prepare clay buckets full of mead and beer

And drink up the beauty of the rot . . .

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While a Seyfert flare blazed out of Sagittarius

And the Pliocene warmed into the Holocene

And the Storegga Slide battered water into Scotland

And a flood carved through South Coast chalk.

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Steam arises from the tuns of Abingdon

A boy wrinkles his nose at the smell

Warm, invisible, drifting between bricks and caravans

Boiled underpants, barley sugar, sour grass and clods…

Moorland’s Old Speckled Hen

Of course, it’s a rite of passage to start to drink in a pub in England (as it is in many other places) and I was new to it because we had lived abroad, but my school friends, when they were eighteen, were already used to drinking six pints, seven pints, up to ten pints in one session; you are constantly going to the bathroom and at the end of the session you vomit.

At university we didn’t have much money and I was able to resist, but then my friend Pedro would knock at the door and invite me down to the pub in Hackney where the beer had just got slightly better: In the early 80s there was Stella Artois from Belgium, and I drank pints of it. I thought how wonderful it was in comparison to what had gone before; now, of course, people look down on it. My friend Pedro looked like Diego Maradona, and so when Diego Maradona scored the second goal against England in the world cup in 1982 with his hand, the next time we went down to the pub we were thrown out and told not to come back.

And of course, on and off and again and again you go to the pub in England, but I didn’t quite get the hang of it until I met Tony. Tony is a great philosopher, a kind of genius newspaperman who decided to hide his light a bit from hoi poloi. He composes songs, reads books, and knows a lot about everything. We were colleagues together for about six years and often at the end of the week we’d go down to the Eel Pie pub in Twickenham.

At the time he was drinking Tanglefoot, and so I drank Tanglefoot, which tasted like it had been slopping around a cedar casket for six months before it was bottled. And of course, in Twickenham, you have the river, you have Eel Pie Island, and Pope’s Grotto. So we wandered around and talked and met up with other people and, eventually started going to beer festivals, and, more memorably, on pub crawls.

A pub crawl is an honourable tradition in our northern archipelago: it is a walk punctuated with visits to different pubs, each of which has its own history. And so this is the story of one of our early pub crawls.

The trip began at a bus stop by the A3. You can see the bus approaching. Perhaps it is the 265.

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At New Malden, I stepped off the bus at The Fountain pub bus stop, crossed the road and walked past the boarded up police station on my way to the train station.

Since then, the police station has been remodelled into a pub called The Watchman. The Fountain has been knocked down and its customers dispersed. Some of them may have made it across the road to The Watchman, though you never know.

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I caught the train to Waterloo. It was a grey day, but I was full of anticipation. Visiting pubs with Anthony is a privilege and an education.

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I met Anthony on the Waterloo station concourse. We marched along to Hungerford Bridge.

His jacket smelling of gunpowder, Anthony began by quoting Wilhelm Liebknecht’s description of a pub crawl Liebknecht had gone on with the secular, Jewish Messiah, Karl Marx. Liebknecht said he went on the pub crawl in order to investigate the roots of this old British tradition.

‘One evening, Edgar Bauer, acquainted with Marx from their Berlin time and then not yet his personal enemy […], had come to town from his hermitage in Highgate for the purpose of “making a beer trip.” The problem was to “take something” in every saloon between Oxford Street and Hampstead Road – making the something a very difficult task, even by confining yourself to a minimum, considering the enormous number of saloons in that part of the city. But we went to work undaunted and managed to reach the end of Tottenham Court Road without accident.’

Wilhelm Liebknecht

‘This is the best view of London’, Tony said. So I took a picture of the view.

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Anthony is looking at the riverbank. Unfortunately, the photo doesn’t show much of the riverbanks, though you can see St Pauls.

‘That,’ said Tony, pointing down at it, is Gordon’s Wine Bar, a real wine bar – the oldest in London. The bar was established in 1890. It was popular in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. It hasn’t been done up much. It is what it is.’ Tony said.

Since then, Gordon’s Wine Bar has become much more fashionable. Young people come in crowds. It is small inside, so many of the customers sit outside in the cold. They have heaters, but the heaters don’t keep you warm.

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In 2008, the gold letters of Gordon’s Wine Bar needed retouching.

Tony said that Rudyard Kipling lived above the wine bar for a while. After a few pints downstairs, Kipling would go upstairs to write his novel: ‘The Light that Failed’. He probably wrote some poetry there, too. 

Past Charing Cross, we went up a small street to the Lamb and Flag.

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The pub is built on a slope. Inside the pub, it smelled of plumbing, beer and varnish. The landlord was surly. He had reached that age when the corners of your mouth droop and it becomes too much of an effort to smile.

The Lamb and Flag was established in 1623. It is at the centre of theatre land. I found a picture of James Mason with a Siamese cat. Dryden and Charles Dickens were regulars. The Lamb and Flag is the insignia of Preston North End Football Club. Tony is from Preston.

Tony said he liked Ian Jack who wrote in the Guardian. He challenged me to find fault with a piece Ian Jack had just written, so I found fault with it. RIP, Ian Jack.

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The next pub was The Harp. It is very famous and one leg of most London pub crawls. The pub was busy. You can see Anthony in the picture trying to get in an order.

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I tried London Porter. The beer tastes of dark roasted coffee. You swallow and wait. It is a taste that takes its time in coming, only to slip away down the backstreets of your throat. I prefer it to Old Peculiar.

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We made for the next pub. It was the Old Coffee House in Covent Garden. I can’t remember who served us, all I remember is the beer which was good: Brodies Olde Ardour. 

The landlord of the next pub, The Dog and Duck in Soho, was Natalie. As we chatted with her, a small woman in a raincoat peeped through the window. She stared, smiled, and then ducked down below the sill. Then popped her head up again. I waved, she waved back and came in. I gave her two pounds. She gave me a hug.

She turned to Natalie. ‘Can I ask anyone else?’

‘No Pam, only the ones you know.’

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‘What’s her story?’ asked Tony.

‘Pam looks older, but she is forty six.’

‘What? Forty-six!’ said Tony (who was forty-six).

‘She was an alcoholic, but gave that up for slot machines. She’s famous, you know. They mention her in guidebooks and there’s a picture of her in a pub nearby.’ 

I didn’t like the beer as much: Lancaster Red. On the way to the loo, I stopped to read about the history of the pub. Mozart had lived nearby. Perhaps he had visited the pub. Natalie confirmed it: 

‘Yes that’s right, he did. He played the piano here.’

‘The pub is famous for George Orwell, too’, said Tony. ‘Look at the sign up there.’ It said The George Orwell Bar.

The walk to the next pub was longer. We walked into St James’s Churchand caught part of a rehearsal for a piano recital. I loved the way the poor acoustics at the entrance blurred the notes into a stream of sound.

‘It’s not supposed to do that’, said Tony.

 What we heard was a snatch of Debussy’s Arabesques. The pianist was Julian Jacobson, and the Piano was a Fazioli..

The light was beautiful. We walked past a shop selling yachts. That morning, walking my youngest daughter to school, she asked me why Carlos Slim was so rich. Carlos Slim is Mexican. In 2013 and 14 he was named the richest man in the world.

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Then we crossed the street to the second-to-last pub in Whitehall, The Red Lion. It is situated at the centre of power. During the week politicians drink here. Some of them must bring bodyguards. I ordered the beer Dad used to drink in Chiswick, London Pride, and looked longingly at the pies.

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Tony and I sat outside. Anthony told me about his old girlfriend who had worked at the foreign office nearby. He showed me the entrance to the building where she had worked.

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By then it was dark, so we walked to Victoria. We went past a place that reminded me of bad times. By the time we got to the last pub, we were both feeling a little tired. Tony stopped a fight. Two hooligans were ready to beat up the pub manager. We took the train back together, and Anthony got off at Wimbledon.

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