Your Local Pub

The next nearest after that is Ships, which is our favorite bar. Ships is little with one pool table and a great fucking jukebox (bob wills and lightin' hopkins). And it's next door to our fave restaurant, El Monterrey, so you can imagine we get a lot of use out of that particular block.

Mark (still not recovered from the experience, age 9)

I have two more or less equidistant pubs too:

The Brownswood, on the corner of Brownswood Road and Green Lanes. Mainly used a landmark when giving people directions. I haven't drunk in there for at least two years. It's just a typical residential area pub. Middle agedish, localish, largeish, serving cheap pub food specialsish. Blackboards with coloured writing. You know the kind of place. Nondescript.

The Stoke Tup on Church St. Yeach. Once the Magpie & Stump, then taken over by the Tup chain and given the 'Stoke' bit about a year ago. Very new Stoke Newington. Boring atmosphere. About the only pub in the area to chuck you out on time. Doesn't even have a pool table upstairs anymore. A bit rubb.

closer pubs to me than peggspub and coldplayspub is the bar at the back of our kebab shop, sans atmosphere but open till 1pm, free chips, enormous measures and decorated like your grans.

in the other direction, The Settle Inn which has the finest selection of board games in the land. well... only about seven, but the alco-buckaroo challenge is a fine, fine thing indeed.

This is God's Own Pub. Cheap as chips, proper beer, as old as the hills, full of marginal types but cool because Cath the landlady rules with a rod of iron. On days when there's trouble int' air she locks the front door and vets everybody when they knock on. A somewhat Cavalier attitude to license restrictions as they apply to opening times. To say the least. Darts, Bar Billiard, Pool and Pinball. I love this pub.

Settle Inn is probably even more All Bar One-ish that the Duke O'York because they do proper food - not Thai Muck.

I have started going to one on the Mount quite regularly and it's very good indeed, a standard working pub that sells damn good beer, and good food.

I think N. is being unduly harsh about this pub. I was in there for just over an hour on Saturday night and I quite liked it....Bombadier on tap, friendly staff and nicely subdued lighting. The Stoke Tup name is a terrible pun, but the chain doesn't seem nearly as awful a brand as many I could mention....the Latin enscription on the lit up fag machine sign could even be described as cerebral. It began Oves optima (Best sheep? Top sheep?) Can't remember the other two or three words as I don't even possess schoolboy Latin.

However, as soon as I actually move to Highgate, it becomes a flipping 'juke joint' with hipsters lining the walls and checking out each other's boxing boots and asymmetric haircuts. Bah. Although Shane Macgowan hangs out there for days sometimes.

Also - they have bloody live bloody country bloody music on Sunday nights, when I'm trying to get to sleep to remove the badness of the weekend's drinking in order to make a half-presentable appearance at work on Monday morning. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THOSE METROSEXUAL BASTARDS?

The Marlborough is also Enrique's local but he doesn't go out of the house ever.

Also, they have a picture of Art Garfunkel behind the bar.

Just up the road is the Crown, which has two big screens showing football. It's a bit shabby, but basically pretty ILE-friendly, and indeed has been the venue of two accidental SE London FAPs in my time. The fancyapint link is talking nonsense, as there are three pubs and three bars on that road alone andd a further two round the corner. Also, the picture was clearly taken in 1985, as it looks nothing like that any more.

I still go to the Dacre Arms at least twice a week though. It is marvellous and warm and friendly and has a proper pub landlord like off the telly and two dogs and the same six old men sitting in the same place all the time.

Also within mere yards are The Freemasons (slogan: 'it's not what you think it's where you drink' arrgh fuck off), The Farm, the Biscuit Factory, The Coopers Cask ,and the cavernously awful Providence (prev. Litten Tree, prev. Bar Med). Astonishingly, I have never been to ANY of these. I prefer to return to my old locale where I can get Harveys and pool in the inexplicably Aussie-themed Cobblers Thumb (plus lethal Old Rosie cider arrr) or the teeny tiny Rose Hill.