Look, call us controversialists or clickbait merchants if you like but we speak our minds. And we happen to think that pubs are quite good. There. We said it.
We’ve been thinking and talking about Pete Brown’s recent post urging more positivity around beer. It’s a tricky one, this, because mindless positivity can be a problem. It’s how you end up with hype around things that don’t deserve it and it can damage trust.
We’ve moved the rest of this piece over to our blog. We stopped posting actively on Substack at the end of 2025 and are slowly migrating the most interesting stuff from here to there. Do check it out.
Back to the Local is, er, back
Maurice Gorham’s book about London pubs was first published in 1939 under the title The Local. Then, as we understand it, almost every copy was destroyed in the Blitz – along with many of London’s pubs. After the war, he revisited the text and it was republished in 1949 as Back to the Local.
Gorham writes wonderfully about pubs – a subject on which he clearly felt something more than journalistic curiosity – poignantly evoking a lost city and a lost time.
There have been various reprints over the years, including a plain-covered Faber Finds edition, and a lovely hardback which reproduces Edward Ardizzone’s charming illustrations in colour.
Now, there’s a neat paperback edition with a new cover and, most intriguingly, a fold-out map.
We’ve previously followed one of Gorham’s pub crawls but this could tempt us to get exploring again. Which pubs are still there? Which are gone? And which of them still have the magic they held 80 years ago?
The Sandringham: Benguiat in the bin
One of our local-ish pubs, The Sandringham on Sandy Park Road in Brislington, Bristol, is undergoing a makeover.
When we visited in 2022 we found a classic outer-Bristol pub. It was slightly tatty with ageing customers and very flat Bass served from a mirrored box. It was also very much a darts pub with a lot of space given over to oches and boards.
As is often the case with pubs like this, though, we found ourselves wondering how long it might survive in that form. The houses nearby, mostly Victorian and Edwardian terraces, are increasing in price. And the businesses on Sandy Park Road are gradually creeping upmarket, with more delis and cafes and shops selling what Charlie Brooker once called “fuckery-foo”.
Then last week we noticed that a refurb was underway. The distinctive 1980s or 90s signs, in Benguiat, AKA The Stranger Things font, were in a skip. And the woodwork was being painted grey. Oh no – not grey.
We’ll pop in again when the refurb is done.
On the blog
Our chunkiest post in the past month was about video games in pubs – a brief craze that lasted from the 1970s to the 1990s, starting with Pong. It prompted some good comments and memories both on the post and on social media across various platforms.
We wrote about the danger of being a quite good brewery in a highly competitive market: “Bad feedback, unpleasant as it might be to hear, is at least possible to act upon. But what do you do in the face of silent shrugs?”
Jess provided notes on a crawl of crusty-hippy-stoner pubs in East Bristol, including observations on our differing tastes in pubs: “All of them have hippy vibes of varying degrees and make me feel nostalgic for my early drinking days – while leaving Ray a little on edge. He’s such a clean boy!”
Off the back of a trip to Manchester we wrote about two very different Alberts: a fancy, modern German-style beer hall in the city centre, and a Victorian social club in the suburbs.
There were also weekly editions of news, nuggets and longreads, plus footnotes on those posts for Patreon supporters. In fact, we made one of those public, in case you want a taste for free.
And that’s it — that’s your lot. Until next month. Byeeee!
Jess & Ray
In the 90s and 2000s, estate agents in desirable bits of London used to be painted a shade I christened ‘Fuck Off Navy’. There’s definitely a sense these days that a certain matt grey means your Sunday roast is going to cost you £30 and you’ll get sneered at if you just want to sit and drink a pint of Old Bastard. Or even two-thirds of kumquat and iguana pastry stout.