113. Some pubs near Tottenham Court Road selected by Richard Bradshaw, Saturday 17th November 2007

Avril had finally arrived in the UK from Canada and as I had to meet her from the airport in London, it made sense to also arrange a beer session so that she could meet Mr Richard Bradshaw and Mr and Mrs Matthew Oliver. Avril and I were staying at the Marriott at West India Quay. Due to some maintenance on the Docklands Light Railway, we had to walk to Canary Wharf and use the Underground to get to the centre of London rather than just stumble out of our hotel, but at least this meant that we were not disturbed by the clicking and whirring of the DLR from some ungodly hour of the morning.

We alighted at Tottenham Court Road tube and made our way in the rain along Charing Cross Road. The first pub, the Royal George, isn't actually on Charing Cross Road but rather on a side street off it so we overshot. Fortunately a telephone call to Mr B guided us to the correct point. The Royal George is quite nice and not too busy, pricey, trendy or generally offensive as one might find in other London pubs. We got a nice seat in the window and watched the world go by. They have a couple of real ales on too, and the London Pride was pretty good. They also do Dark Budvar. On our visit service was a bit slow as there was a problem with the till.

Richard Bradshaw raves about Bradleys1, and you can see why! This is a tiny Spanish bar just off of Oxford Street. We sat underneath the stairs in the slightly larger downstairs part. This is apparently quite authentically Spanish although this might be stretching the point a little. However they do have a fair few Iberian knick knacks around the place, and they also do a good bit of Spanish lager. The toilets are a bit grimly though. They also have a very good juke box. All in all, a good place to be. It turned out that we were lucky as by the time we left, it was heaving in there.

The Intrepid Fox has moved from that narrow little street in Soho to larger and arguably less charming premises near Tottenham Court Road. However, being the Intrepid Fox, we really felt that we had to pay it a visit. It is at least a bit cleaner than it was before and still has many of the rock posters up, but somehow there has been a bit of a loss of atmosphere. There has also been a bit of a loss of beer as they were not even able to dispense pissflow bitter! I had to have generic lager instead.

Time was moving on a bit and we had arranged to rendezvous in the Bloomsbury a little way eastwards towards Holborn. I quite like this pub and as a typical London boozer, it gives a pretty good account of itself. It was packed, but we got a pretty good seat at the end of the bar and managed to put away about 3 or 4 pints of what were highly acceptable Shepherd Neame products (Masterbrew, Spitfire, Bishops Finger etc). I had to use the toilet quite a lot in here which was a perilous walk.

Another fairly typical London boozer is the Ship down an alleyway near Holborn. This wedge shaped pub also has quite hard to reach toilets. They also had a pretty good variety of beer including some novelty offering which actually was a bit too novelty for my liking. Our final stop of the expedition lay across the alleyway in a pub that I haven't visited before, Bar Polski. As you can imagine, this is a Polish themed bar with a number of interesting vodkas and some fairly good continental lager at a pretty reasonable price (Matt chose to drink Guinness for some reason though). The interior is a little spartan and sterile, being wipe clean tables and wipe clean stools in a wipe clean room. It makes a change though and I rather liked it.

As a final twist to the crawl, we headed for Holborn underground to board our trains. Richard managed to get separated from us and head in the wrong direction. Before we realised what had happened however, he shot into our carriage just before our train left and proclaimed 'I've just been to Chancery Lane and back!' Well played!

1 Richard has also made direct reference to this crawl on a recent post to the Face of Cheam blog spot.


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Dan Lovegrove
dan@doctor-lovegrove.com

Last updated 15th January 2008.