147. Putney, Friday 10th May 2013

Avril and I headed to London to do a birthday pub crawl for me one Friday, and it was decided to meet up with Richard Bradshaw after he had got out of work. We made our way to the White Horse at Parson's Green. It was a nice day but we managed to get a seat outside despite the presence of a number of Sloane Rangers and awaited the arrival of Mr B. He arrived in non-work clothes and I accused him of having a dress down Friday but in fact he had got changed at work. Despite some delays in being able to consume it, the beer at the Sloaney Pony was good, comprising several interesting ales which I forgot to make a note of.

Putney was the destination that we were aiming for and we soon arrived just north of the bridge. There are a couple of shit pubs there and we went into the less offensive one, the Temperance. This is a massive vacuous venue with an island bar and a slightly stoned looking barman. Despite the place being pretty empty, it seemed to take an age to get served and there weren't many decent seats at the bar, so I don't rate one's chances being served quickly on a busy day. One bright spot was that despite the place being pretty obviously geared towards lagers, they had some decent bitters - Doom Bar, Greene King IPA and London Pride - which were in reasonable condition.

A much better pub is the Eight Bells at Putney Bridge Station. This is a much smaller pub than the previous one, a real boozer with a U-shaped bar. Avril had some sort of black sambuca or similar, served by a barmaid who may have had some native American heritage, while I made do with some very palatable Doom Bar although it was a bit strange that this was the only real ale on. Excellent background music was provided by Fern Kinney 'Together we are Beautiful' and Althea and Donna 'Up Town Top Ranking'. I'd have stayed for more and indeed Richard has since returned on several occasions.

A pub that claims to have a permanent beer festival is the Bricklayers' Arms, in a backstreet of Putney. They were not wrong, as this was a fine little pub with a wide selection of expertly kept beers which changed during our two pint stay. The majority of beers were from the Plain brewery (Salisbury), being named after puns on 'inn', but were basically a mild, porter, stout, bitter and blond. I had all the dark ones and thoroughly enjoyed them. They also had Vale Conspiracy, Windsor and Eton Conqueror and Forest Dark. We enjoyed our beers in the relaxing garden as it was pretty busy inside, especially as the pub is not that big and is pretty narrow by the time you get past the main serving area. The toilets mirror the crampedness. Good though and worth another visit.

The Jolly Gardeners’ is nearby and is a much more gastro type establishment although not wanky in any way at all. It was fairly quiet and chilled out when we visited and actually extremely pleasant. There is a large bar area and some good beer dispensed - Sambrooks Junction, Old Golden Hen, Doom Bar, and Oxford Gold. Alas it had got to home time however, so we got on a 93 and headed to Wimbledon where our paths would divide. There was time for one or two more though, in the Hand and Racquet, a rather large and bright but pleasingly empty pub in a vaguely Wetherspoons mould which fortunately seemed to be winding down by the time we got there. Pretty good beer on, with four reasonably good ones present which as it was late and we had had lots, I obviously didn't record.


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Dan Lovegrove
dan@doctor-lovegrove.com

Last updated 20th October 2013.