The Pub Curmudgeon

I was prompted to create the current poll by a Twitter discussion about this blogpost by Seeing the Lizards, and replies by Boak & Bai...

Eyebrows were raised by a press report last week of comments by scientist Dr Kari Poikolainen, a former World Health organisation alcohol ex...

Sometimes I get an idea for a blogpost, only to realise I’ve said pretty much exactly the same thing before. Yesterday I was in Joule’s exce...

We are often told that the British pub is in headlong decline, with a tidal wave of closures and pubgoing increasingly becoming irrelevant...

Someone said to me on Twitter: “I would have thought Spoons were right up your street – no music, cheap beer and grumpy old blokes.” I certa...

The latest bizarre interior design feature to appear in pubs is the proliferation of scatter cushions. They’ve appeared in a number of Robin...

In the 1960s, there was a wave of railway branch line closures stemming from the notorious “Beeching Axe”, which often came up against passi...

It was reported this week that, after having successfully trialled the concept, a company was planning to roll out its Pound Pub concept ac...

I’ve often made the point on here that no amount of planning restrictions will save a single pub if the underlying demand isn’t there. This ...

The reason cask beer dramatically turned the tables against keg in the 1970s was not some issue of principle – it was that, quite simply, wh...

Well, the relatively small number of people who responded to my poll weren’t very optimistic about the prospects for any further duty conces...

The past couple of months have seen a flurry of articles in the media that suggest the “craft beer” phenomenon has finally escaped from the ...

Last year I posted some pictures of the Davenport Arms (aka the Thief’s Neck) at Woodford and made the comment that, while in most respects...

The J. D. Wetherspoon vouchers distributed by CAMRA to its members have proved to be a considerable source of controversy. To some they are ...

Premium Bottled Ales are in a sense the older, staider relation of craft keg beers. They’ve been around for a lot longer, and have less of a...