On our recent trip to England, we enjoyed some British Pub Life.
Pubs in the UK are primarily places to socialise. Yes you can get drunk if you want, and yes you can often sit down to a meal, but you don’t have to do either, because you can simply go to a pub to enjoy a drink and spend time with friends. You don’t even have to sit down, you can remain on your feet and be socially mobile, free of the strictures of sitting in one place.
Pub Life
This kind of pub life doesn’t really exist in Ontario. There are plenty of places that are called pubs, even places that claim to be authentically British, but they do not contain pub life, at least not as I know it.
The first thing an Ontario pub will make you do is sit down. The vast majority are table service, and the clue is in the name, there. Yes, you can go to the bar to order, but you’ll end up sitting on a stool there because in most Ontarian pubs, you don’t pay until it’s time to leave, and they do like to keep track of you until then.
Then you’ll find that most people in an Ontarian pub will be there to eat. Again sitting, obviously, but it’s more restaurant than pub at that point, only the presence of alcoholic drinks will give the game away. Of course there’s nothing wrong in going to a pub to eat, but it doesn’t do much for the socialising aspects of pub life.
There are also the people who go to Ontarian pubs to get drunk. Usually loners, propping up the bar and being a long way from any social situation. There is something called Safe Serve in Ontario, where bar staff are trained, and certified, in dealing with people who drink too much. Safe Serve came about after an individual successfully sued a bar for selling them too much alcohol, after that individual has caused mayhem elsewhere while under the influence of the booze. Most bar staff where we live don’t worry too much about the heavy drinkers, but a place in Waterloo we visited had notices up to say that no one would be served more than two drinks. Again, hardly conducive to a social setting.
Sitting! A pub in Michigan.
There are clubs, with music and dancing, that are far more pub-like that actual Ontarian pubs. But they have a different vibe altogether, and you lose the social aspect when you have to shout to get even the most basic conversation heard. Not pub life, in my view.
We were in a pub in Whitehall, London, on the day of the Cenotaph Remembrance Parade, and it was packed with people who’d been parading. So many were standing in groups, clutching drinks, and enjoying just talking with one another. Drinks were bought and paid for at the bar, and taken to the standing huddle, so that the socialising could continue. Now that’s pub life.
We also visited a pub in Wapping, where most customers were sitting to eat, but there was a group of friends at the bar, standing and drinking, and getting really quite noisy. That, though, was pub life too; people enjoying themselves and their group laughter was infectious. No one was drunk, for sure, but they were all enjoying that social freedom that you can achieve with a couple of drinks – although of course alcohol isn’t necessary if you don’t want it to be.
The Duke of Sussex in Waterloo, one of our pub life stops
I’m never going to find pub life in Ontario because the culture is different, despite claims to the contrary by people who run pubs here. I’m certainly not going to give up my easy North American lifestyle just for a bit of pub life, but when we go back across the Pond, the pub is one of our first ports of call.
A couple of good choices helped us have a really good time in England this year.
First was choosing British Airways for the flights. They were cheaper than Air Canada and offered a better seat. They use the far superior Terminal 5 at Heathrow, which aided transit significantly. Oh, and they gave us a free, and un-requested, upgrade on our seats for the flight home. Well done BA!
Then it was choosing Sixt car rental. They’re physically located in Terminal 5, which is a massive plus, meaning no bus trips off site. Their price was all inclusive, no extras unless I asked for them. Yes, I was upsold a better car, which pushed the rental price up by quite a lot, but the car, an automatic Audi A3, was the mutt’s nuts, very comfortable and very easy on the juice.
Our next success was the choice of cottage in Yorkshire. It was an outstanding rental and suited us a couple perfectly. Being November, it was also very reasonably priced. I had my doubts about its location, but as it turned out we were ideally placed to do the city trips, Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, and keep the mileage to a minimum.
Booking public transit ahead of time was good. We’d ordered Tourist Oyster cards (pre-paid travel cards) for London, which was essential, but we also booked trips to Liverpool and to Birmingham on mainline trains, and the Heathrow Express in London, getting good deals along with the discount travelcard (£30 for a Two Together card, giving 33% off most train fares) that we’d also ordered ahead of time. We didn’t get to do the Liverpool trip by train, but because I’d booked online, the train company emailed the night before travel to say that trains had been cancelled, and offered a refund. That gave us time to rejig our plans, and I did get the fares back.
We’d kept looking to see if ITV’s Coronation Street Experience in Manchester would be available while we were in England, and just a week or two before we set off, they opened up a few days and we were able to book a couple of places on that. It was a seriously mad experience, but really worth doing.
The London accommodation was a good pick, too, although there is a lot of choice and I’m sure there were many other good places we could have chosen. We were wise to stay a little out of Central London and use the excellent and inexpensive transit systems to travel in each day, not just from a cost point of view. Travelling home on the bus at night was a joy to behold, to see the (other) city that never sleeps.
We did a fair bit of walking, in London at least, and while tiring, it was wonderful to see so much in such a small area. Public transit is OK, but Shanks’ Pony worked well for us on a couple of occasions.
I think England, and London particularly, is a great place to eat and drink. Yes, we searched out those foods that are familiar to us, but dropping into pubs for pints of beer, gins, and football, is a great way to spend a rainy afternoon. The vegan choices on pretty much all London menus kept SWMBO very happy indeed, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that we gorged ourselves the whole time.
If there was one negative thing, it was being in England in November. The weather we knew, but I’d clean forgotten just how early it gets dark there, being considerably closer to the North Pole than our little home in Canada (we live on the same latitude as Milan). In London it wasn’t so important as everything stays open late there anyway, but any outdoor activity has to be completed by 4pm at the latest. Still, you live and learn.
It’s a shame, but I don’t think we’ll be heading back to the UK for a while now, unless family matters arise. We need to start saving again!
Our first port of call today was Westminster Bridge again, this time to Facetime with Charlie for the full twelve bongs of Big Ben, at midday of course.
It was raining when we arrived, and the streets around were thronged with tourists, and I’m talking three deep on the pavement here. We had a little while to wait so headed to a pub. It was packed, so we went along Whitehall to the next pub, The Red Lion. Officially it’s on Parliament Street, but who cares when there’s the prospect of a pint of Fuller’s ESB coming your way?
We did find a couple of stools to sit on here, so we stayed. When I was waiting to order, the barman was explaining the Parliamentary Division Bell to a couple of tourists. The Division Bell is a bell that sounds in Parliament when the house “divides” to vote on something. As I caught another barman’s eye he said, “It’s up there”.
I said, “What’s up there?”.
He said, “The Division Bell”.
I said, “I only want a beer”.
At this point he realised that it wasn’t me asking about the bell. Cue one very confused young barman.
Anyway, there is a Division Bell in this pub, as there is in most of the buildings along Whitehall and Downing Street, that sounds when the House is about vote. It lets people like MPs and Lords know to put down whatever they’re doing and head over to the House of Commons, just at the end of the street. Voting in the House has to be done in person, of course. The Division Bell didn’t sound when we were in the pub, so I could enjoy my excellent beer in peace. Or relative peace, because like all other pubs in Central London, this one was quite noisy.
Back to the task in hand, off we scuttled in the rain to Westminster Bridge. The tourists were all there, regardless of the deluge that was about to ensue, but we managed to get onto the south side of the bridge. The rain was hammering down, but we stood fully five minutes in it, talking to Charlie and Emma in Canada, and me recording the event. The Quarter chimes were just starting when a tourist fellow a few feet away started hollering at the top of his voice for his kids to come back to him. I hollered, quite fairly I thought, “Stop shouting!”, and while he grumbled a bit, he did stop shouting. I know he was just trying to attract his kids’ attention, but he effectively drowned out most of the Quarter chimes. Tsk. I have it all on video.
Our immediate plans had to change because the rain was so heavy, and we were soaked through. We decided to head to South Kensington and the Victoria and Albert (V&A) museum.
There is a tunnel which runs from the tube station to the V&A, and the other museums, so as we walked to the museum, we stayed out of the rain and away from the traffic, which was good. What wasn’t so good was the stream of visitors heading to the V&A with us, and the galleries closest to that tunnel entrance were packed. The queue for the Café was huge, as was the queue for the toilets, so we moved off to the Diva exhibition of British Fashion through the ages.
I’m sure that the vast numbers in the museum that day were in part due to the weather. Like all the major museums in the UK, it’s free to enter, so it makes a great place to get out of the rain. I’m still slightly shocked, though, at the sheer numbers of visitors in mid-November. What must it be like in the Summer?
We looked at the fashions, which were fascinating, then at all manner of domestic historical items that made up people’s homes through the centuries. While it was all stuff from the homes of the wealthy and well-to-do, it was still really interesting. The problem with the V&A, and the other museums, is that it is vast. We wandered around for an hour two before fatigue overtook us, and we’d barely seen anything. Like the man in the orange V&A jacket said, you really need to decide what you’re going to look at before you arrive, and just go straight there. He’s not wrong.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
The rain had stopped, and we still had some daylight, so we decided to head to Chelsea Football Club’s ground and its superstore, to buy some gewgaws. Well, you have to, really. We hadn’t eaten, so we stopped for a sausage roll and a Samosa from a little kiosk at the tube station, then headed west on the Underground. We got to Earls Court, ready to change onto a Wimbledon train when the announcement came over the PA system that there was a trespasser on the tracks at High Street Kensington, so all Wimbledon trains were stopped. What to do, what to do?
We decided to continue on foot, despite the fatigue, but then I messed up. When you leave a tube station, there are often many exits, and looking at my A to Z map, I incorrectly assumed we had left by the exit on Warwick Road. Not so, apparently. I am sensible enough to keep checking the map, but to put the mistake right it added about 15 minutes walking (that maybe an exaggeration). On the way, though, we were able to walk through Brompton Cemetery, which was on our list of things to do anyway. Unfortunately, it was 3:35pm and the gates closed at 4pm, so we were on a bit of a time crunch, not least because it’s a big place and we had to walk from one end to the other. I was panicking about getting locked in, so it was all a bit of a rush. However, we found the plot we were looking for and took a squillion photographs.
As we were heading to the gates of the Cemetery, a Royal Parks car came through with a loudspeaker on it, telling us all to vamoose, and we made it with barely a minute to spare. Like the museum, the Cemetery is so full of interesting stuff that you really need much, much longer to explore.
Chelsea FC and Stamford Bridge were excellent, even if the prices of stuff in their shop were daylight robbery, and as it was getting dark we mooched over to Fulham Broadway tube station to get the Underground back into the West End. We’d decided to visit the Marquess of Anglesey pub in Bow Street, Covent Garden, because that was the site of my first pint of beer in London, when my dear departed older brother met me there in 1977. I remember the occasion well, and that the beer was 26p a pint.
On the way to the pub I thought it wise to check out a restaurant to eat at, because although the pub advertised meals, I had my doubts. We eventually ate in the Wildwood Italian restaurant, right opposite the Royal Opera House, where we were skillfully upsold an expensive bottle of Negrini water. Not that the restaurant was any more expensive than anywhere else, but the waiters were clearly pushing to maximise the bill, and why not? We did make it to the pub, and it was packed. The noise level was huge, like all the other pubs we’d been into, and it’s just people socialising, not eating or trying to get drunk; that’s how English pubs work, mainly the socialising.
After the one drink, we went outside and had a lovely walk around Covent Garden. We saw the street in which Victorian Maynes had lived, and saw their church where they were baptised and married. The old market building, still boarded up when I first went to London in 1977, two years after it has stopped being a market, was lit up in its Christmas finery. At 7pm, it was packed with people, and most of the shops that now occupy the market were doing a good trade. From there we walked up Neal Street towards where the aforementioned dear departed brother used to live. We stopped on the way to pick up cupcakes (of course we did), then ambled up towards St. Giles. Neal Street used to be almost entirely greengrocers’ shops (being close to the market, of course). Those shops didn’t have windows and doors, but opened straight onto the street, so at night they were closed up with boards. If you went down there on a Sunday, it was a ghost town of boarded shopfronts. Now the street is full of very trendy shops and packed with people, seemingly 24/7.
St. Giles was the site of my first workplace in London, although the building has long since been demolished and replaced by something big and orange. The Angel pub is still there, as is the convenience store next door, the home of my youthful Mars Bar cravings.
We crossed New Compton Street which was, as my family tree research informed me, the home to another part of the Mayne dynasty. It’s all post-war development now, but I never had any idea that my ancestors had been so close when I worked just across the street.
Our target for the evening was Oxford Street, London’s main shopping street, to see the Christmas lights. After Covent Garden’s impressive display, I’m afraid Oxford Street’s offering was paltry. Somehow, Oxford Street always was a bit of a disappointment.
Heading back to Lower Clapton (the official area designation, I’m told), Liverpool Street Station was a bit of mess because there had been a “Passenger Incident” that was affecting trains on the line we were to use. As I had my lucky mascot (t’wife) with me, there was a train waiting to leave, and although it was standing room only because so many other trains had been cancelled, we reasoned it was only four stops, so on we hopped. Two passenger incidents on the same day, it must be some kind of record.
That was a long day, and we were both shattered, but we had covered an awful lot of ground and ticked a few things off the list, so it was all good.
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