London Calling

There's still a decent backlog of Dublin posts to be put up, but a potential prime weekend of pub visiting was replaced by a visit to Wembley instead last weekend. But London has pubs too!

Admittedly, it has a hell of a lot less pubs than it had before - about 30% have closed since 2002 with some boroughs losing 50% but there are still over three times as many as in all of County Dublin - and I suspect that a decent number in Dublin would not be covered by the methodology used to decide what is a pub for those official stats (theatres, aerodrome licences and so on).

First pub for me was a quaint Victorian boozer down the road from my hotel - The Rose in Vauxhall. The two bouncers outside on a quiet enough Friday evening pub me off slightly, but in its quieter daytime form on Saturday afternoon, it provided a decent if phenomenally expensive pint of Beavertown Gamma Ray while giving me somewhere to search for a more interesting pub. This was located down the road, but first I needed something from my hotel room and decided to take a look at its bar

Chino Latino provided a cabaret singer and pianist - at 1pm - and has only two taps, both from Curious Brewing, and both priced at an eye-watering level of nearly £7 a pint after the 'service charge' has been added. The hotel next door featured a slightly awkardly named bar, but I decided that hotel bars were probably not worth bothering with - and anyway, I'd already decided where to go next.

Mother Kelly's Taproom & Bottle Shop in a railway arch on the way towards Vauxhall station has over 30 taps and a significant bottled/canned range to pick from. The range of choice here approaches the unwieldy almost but there should be something for everyone.

The next and final drinking location for the day was the lower concourse of Wembley, where the choices were Budweiser or cask Hobgoblin, the latter of which was extensively spilled over me when someone bumped in to me...


The next day, with some hours to kill, I decided to experience a Samuel Smith's pub, due to the reputation of their owner having preceded them to such an extent. On my way there, I passed this humorously named pub which I decided not to go in to!

The pub in question was the Windsor Castle, with a fine - and completely fake - Victorian interior. It was refurbished and renamed to its original name about 8 years ago. It has a subset of the Samuel Smiths beer range on offer - three lagers, the India Ale, stout and one of the Bitters - but no Mild which is what I was hoping to try as a style that doesn't really get to Ireland very often.

Beers ranged from very cheap for central London (the Bitter) to still reasonable (the India Ale), and the food was acceptably priced and of acceptable quality. Contrary to very recent media reports, phones and tablets weren't banned as even some of the staff were using them!

After finishing eating, I decided to head closer to the airport for my next pint - although I still had a vast amount of time to kill. So the relatively new Brewdog Canary Wharf was next up. This is in a low building beside vastly taller buildings and as such gives an impression of what the new Dublin branch is likely to be like, except for the brewkit in Dublin. The bar is card-only (well, I presume phone pay apps work too) and offers a beer - Hop Exchange - the price of which is index-linked to the FTSE - presumably safe in the knowledge that any deep drops will reduce the spending power of the local workers anyway!

My final beer of the day was a pint of something so forgettable that I have forgotten it, at The City Bar in London City Airport. This was picked as it was the only one with a free seat in it!