The Next Step

I had to take this adventure beyond the South East of London.  It was already Febuary and I still hadn’t been to anywhere North of the river.  My good mate Woody said he was around for a pub crawl.  It was with Woody that my original interest in pubs began.  Before then my interest in pubs was based only seeing them as a place to drink.  I was more interested in different types of beer and trying as many different beers as I could over time.  I still love trying new beers, going to beer festivals, going to Belgium (Bruge) or just to good pubs to try new beers but it was always just about the beer.  If I could get a good pint of beer that I had never had before that would be great but I didn’t really care where we were.  

Maybe it was because I was starting to have to go further afield to find new beers or if it was just age and looking for a more rounded drinking experience but I started to notice how interesting pubs can be.  I had drunk so many different types of beer (I recently was given a book called 1001 beers to drink before you die, I’d had a large proportion of them).  The reason why Woody played such a big part of this was because he suggested one day that we meet in London for a beer.  We met up at 4pm and went on an epic pub crawl during which I was introduced to some great pubs like The Salisbury pub, the Princess of Wales down by Charring Cross and De Hems in Soho.  This day out was the spark that set my interest in pubs going.  After that pub crawls around London became a semi regular event which has continued to this day.   Most of the pubs we visited were in the West End and Westminster.  Cheers Woody and long my it continue!

I love a guide, as you can probably tell from this blog which its self is based on a guide.  I don’t really follow the view that guides just take you to where all the other tourists go, usually guides like the good pub guide for example, do a very good job.  As such I went to waterstones and bought the CAMRA London Pub Walks book.  I had a look at this and planned to do walk number 21 in Notting Hill and Bayswater as my next pub visit.  This would include two pubs on my list the Churchill Arms and the Windsor Castle.  Importantly as well they were the first two pubs on the walk so I would not be too drunk to give them a good view.