Destination: England : The Pub Lover’s Complete Guide to London

In the 1930s, George Orwell described his ideal pub as a comfortable, convivial place with good conversation and no false pretensions. To others, a good pub is simply a place with quality beer and maybe a few books. For Emily Green, an American food writer living in England, there are two essentials: “a roaring fire and at least one ruddy-cheeked local who will make you feel like a city twit.”

As an American expatriate who has become an addict of that venerable social institution, the English public house, I have spent a great deal of quality time searching for the perfect pub--one that combines amiable drinking mates, Old World ambience and “real” ale.

Happily, this dream has proved to be impossible, and so the search must continue. But along the way, I have collected a notebook filled with excellent entries. And I have learned a great deal about the distinct characteristics of the British pub.

What makes a pub great? Atmosphere, charm, good conversation, friendly bartenders, great beer and, for the utmost perfection in the cold winter months, a crackling fireplace.

If ever I marry a wife,

I’ll marry a landlord’s daughter,

For then I may sit in the bar,

And drink cold brandy and water.

--Charles Lamb, 19th-Century English writer

Two of my all-time favorite pubs are The Dove and the Fox and Hounds, both in London. The Dove is on a quiet street alongside the River Thames, in the same location where it has been serving ale for nearly 200 years. It’s dark. It’s Old World. It’s charming in a Merchant-Ivory sort of way. And it has a great view of the river.

The Dove is in the “Guinness Book of Records” as having the smallest public bar, although with seating for a few dozen, it seemed large enough to me and certainly capable of fulfilling its responsibilities. The anthem “Rule Britannia” was composed upstairs. Inside it is low-beamed and woody, with two big fireplaces. One warm spring afternoon I sat outside on the veranda with the other drinkers and stared across the river. I thought about the British fleet sailing off to tend the empire.

In London pubs you find various brews on draft, including beers and real ale (a fermented drink born in the British Isles that is dark, warm and wonderful), as well as American and European lagers. Among the options: ale, an almost fruity fermented drink made from malt, hops and yeast like beer, but by rapid fermentation at a relatively high temperature; lager, a type of beer with a crisp, dry flavor; bitter, an ale with the aroma of hops that is much loved by the English; stout, a dark brown beer, and porter, a dark beer similar to stout, which usually has a roasted grain flavor.

The Fox and Hounds is a little more upscale than The Dove, but it’s also a tiny, cozy place. And though it has hosted the famous--from Rex Harrison to Harrison Ford--it remains an unobtrusive quaffing spot on a quiet corner in Belgravia, one of London’s toniest quarters. My first visit occurred one dark, wintry evening, just as the landlord was unlocking the doors at about 6 p.m. Inside was a scene out of Dickens: A coal fire burned and wall lamps glowed orange. I sat next to the fire in an overstuffed chair, beneath old engravings of hunting scenes.

As I sipped my Bass ale, the regulars began to arrive: a well-dressed woman from the neighborhood sat on a stool at one end of the bar, a postman sat at the other. They started talking--weather, politics and neighborhood gossip--in a way that seemed to have been a resumption of a conversation interrupted when the pub closed the evening before.

If all be true that I do think,

There are five reasons we should drink;

Good wine--a friend--or being dry--

Or lest we should be by and by--

Or any other reason why.

--Henry Aldrich, 17th-Century English writer

Here’s another reason, for those who need one: ale brewed on the premises.

For a truly fresh beer, you can do no better than one of the many brewpubs dotted across the London landscape. The Ferret and Firkin is one. It brews its own malty dark ale called Dogbolter Bitter.

I found the Ferret and Firkin (a firkin is a quarter barrel) one Sunday afternoon with my brother-in-law, Jeremy, and a friend of ours named Rosy. We settled in for lunch and drinks in this typical city pub, which sits on a corner in Chelsea and has lots of windows, a plank floor and a massive wood bar.

A more central brewpub is the Yorkshire Grey, a 10-minute walk from the British Museum. On my first visit to the Yorkshire Grey, I asked one of the bartenders what he thought of his competitor’s Dogbolter beer. “He come up with a bloody ridiculous name,” growled the barkeep, in a thick Cockney accent. Happy hour at the Yorkshire attracts an unlikely blend of pensioners, polite punks with pierced eyebrows, construction workers and office types. (Nonsmokers be forewarned: Almost every British pub is packed with puffers. This smoke-fogged atmosphere gets even worse in colder months, when doors and window are closed.)

Another of my brewpub favorites, the Orange Brewery, is in a neighborhood of antique shops a short walk from Victoria Station. The pub is named for the small park across the street where actress Nell Gwyn, said to be a mistress of King Charles II, supposedly used to sell oranges in the late 1600s. There has always been a pub on this square called the Orange in honor of Nell. This latter-day version brews its own beer. Like the Yorkshire Grey (both are owned by the multinational company Grand Metropolitan Ltd.) there is a sheen of money at the Orange: The decor is marked by brass lamps and old pictures; bookshelves line the walls. A nice touch is helpful signs that tell about beer styles and tours of the brewery.

The Orange brews a couple of types of bitter and one kind of porter, the latter having a mild, roasted flavor that would be warming on the coldest night. This view was not shared by an American businesswoman who appeared with some office workers and who quizzed the bartender, Bernadette, about the brew. “All they have is bitter,” she said to her companions, curling her lip in apparent disgust. “I’ll have a lager.” Bernadette smiled at me knowingly from across the bar.

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I searched out these brewpubs because of my obsession with fresh local beer--an obsession born of my years as a student here during the 1970s. But plenty of London pubs do not brew their own and are none the worse for it.

For both ambience and location, one of my favorites is the Prince of Wales Ale House in London’s Highgate Village neighborhood, a short walk from Hampstead Heath and Highgate Cemetery (the final resting place of Karl Marx, among others). The Prince of Wales is snug and comfy, a wood-paneled pub with fireplaces at either end of the room. One of the most important duties of a pub--serving hearty game pie or ploughman’s (salad) lunch--is done superbly at the Prince of Wales.

However, because it is in a textbook-quaint and upscale area of north London, it may be beyond the pocketbook of the proletarian. If it is cheap beer and philosophy you’re after, you can’t do better than the Beaver’s Retreat pub on the fourth floor of the Old Building of the London School of Economics, my alma mater.

Books on sociology and economics line the bookcases near the fireplace; overstuffed chairs are filled by Galoise-smoking intellectuals. Beer will forever remain cheap at the university because there is nothing that will likely incite the Trotskyite-leaning student body to riot faster than a hike in beer prices.

“Fields and trees teach me nothing, but people in a city do,” Socrates said, and this is how I feel about London. So, when I’ve had enough of campus atmosphere, I head for the George IV, a classic city pub within spitting distance of the school.

The George IV holds forth on a corner of Portugal Street, opposite The Economist Bookshop and directly under the LSE Government Department. Its central bar is ringed with hanging mugs, and the windows allow the city professionals a good view of passing female students during cocktail hour.

Drink! For you know not whence you came, nor why,

Drink! For you know not why you go, nor where.

--Omar Khayyam, “Rubaiyat”

Not far to the north in the Bloomsbury neighborhood is the Lamb, a gorgeous old place with swiveling mahogany and etched glass panels that divide the bartenders from the patrons. Occasionally, the staff passes around a tray of free sandwiches. Old theatrical prints adorn the walls. My ex-landlady told me she was a regular there in the years after World War II. The Lamb was at one time a favorite haunt of writers, and it is only two blocks from where Charles Dickens once lived. He loved to tipple, though I don’t know whether he came to the Lamb.

“Who comes here? A Grenadier. What does he want? A pot of beer,” Dickens wrote in his last completed novel, “Our Mutual Friend.” He would have a choice of some absolutely superb beers at the Lamb, like Winter Warmer and Oatmeal Stout, both silky smooth dark beers with the robustness to stand up to a London winter fog.

For the ultimate in beer choices, though, one must wait until summer. At London’s Great British Beer Festival, held each August, more than 300 of the finest ales in the country are on tap in the city’s famous Olympia exhibition hall, a massive Victorian building with a 100-foot-high vaulted glass ceiling. For three days the hall becomes the city’s biggest pub.

In addition to doing some heavy beer sampling when I visited last summer, I wandered around and I found myself staring at Michael Jackson, who was surrounded by legions of devout fans. This Michael Jackson, however, was not the pop star but rather the man recognized by many as the world’s leading expert on beer and ale. He had recently chosen a Yorkshire brew called Landlord Ale as his selection of the month in a London newspaper column. I asked him about all the fuss over brews. “What’s the difference, isn’t beer beer?”

“That’s like saying wine is wine,” he replied.

A man in a pin-striped suit came over and apologized for intruding. “These Belgian beers you recommended over the years all taste like home brew gone rotten. Can’t you recommend something decent?”

Jackson was patient. “I would suggest you go to the foreign beer bar right now and try a Westmalle Triple. It’s a Belgian monastery beer.”

One final London suggestion: Hamilton Hall, a pub in a corner of the Liverpool Street train station, in the financial district. Hamilton Hall is unquestionably London’s most beautiful pub, situated in an enormous room with 20-foot ceilings decorated with elaborate gold moldings and figurines of angels. Shelves of books stand by the marble fireplace. It seems more like a French tea room or an exhibition hall in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage museum than a pub. Every time I pass through this train station, I consider it mandatory to stop in Hamilton Hall for a pint.

Liverpool Street station is where you catch the train to Norwich, a gorgeous medieval city about a two-hour ride away, and I strongly recommend a visit there to experience rural pubs.

The Fur and Feather in Woodbastwick (about eight miles northeast of Norwich) might be my favorite pub in all of England. Woodbastwick is a pastoral country village surrounded by a patchwork quilt of brown and green fields. The pub occupies a thatched cottage next to a converted barn housing Woodforde’s Norfolk Ale brewery.

Woodforde’s brewery is named for a local country parson, James Woodforde, who kept a detailed record of his life in the late 18th Century. Woodforde brewed often, and he invited the village farmers around for dinner and drinks at his yearly church tithing collection in early December, during which they invariably got drunk.

As he recorded in “The Diary of a Country Parson,” the farmers at the 1791 party, “paid me their respective dues and dined and left about 12 o’clock at night, well pleased with their entertainment. They spoke highly in favour of my strong Beer, they never drank any better they said.”

A mere two centuries later, the judges at the Great British Beer Festival said the same thing about Woodforde’s Norfolk Nog, awarding it first prize in 1992. Norfolk Nog is a winter ale--its robustness and palate reminiscent of the harvest make it just the thing to accompany a game of backgammon by the fire.

Another superb pub region is Dorset, which is also renowned for its lovely countryside of rolling hills and cliffs overlooking the English Channel southwest of London and its emerald pastures stitched together by hedgerows and dotted with stone cottages.

No pub lover should miss the Square and Compass in the tiny Purbeck village of Worth Matravers, west of Bournemouth. Named for the local stone quarrying tools, it is a low-ceilinged, whitewashed stone cottage with heavy wood beams and an enormous fireplace. Mahogany panels line the walls and kegs of beer lie on their sides behind the bar. A neighborhood gathering always seems to be taking place here.

I discovered the Square and Compass on a trip a decade ago and recently returned for a nostalgic visit. Now I shall put my pencil away and have a beer, mindful of what John Ransom, a 20th-Century American poet and critic, wrote:

God have mercy on the sinner

Who must write with no dinner,

No gravy and no grub,

No pewter and no pub,

No belly and no bowels,

Only consonants and vowels.

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GUIDEBOOK: British Draft Choices

Getting there: From LAX fly nonstop to London on American, United, British Air, Virgin Air, Air New Zealand; advance-purchase round-trip fares start at $848.

Pubs: Beaver’s Retreat, 4th floor, Old Building, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London; in London, telephone 071-955-7814.

Ferret and Firkin, 114 Lots Road, Chelsea, London; tel. 071-352-6645.

Fur and Feather Inn, Slad Lane, Woodbastwick, Norfolk; in Norfolk, tel. 0603-720003.

Fox and Hounds, 29 Passmore St., Chelsea, London; tel. 071-730-6367.

George IV, Portugal Street, London; tel. 071-405-6757.

Hamilton Hall, Liverpool Street Station, London; tel. 071-247-3579.

Lamb, 94 Lamb’s Conduit, London; tel. 071-405-0713.

Orange Brewery, 37 Pimlico Road, London; tel. 071-730-5984.

Prince of Wales Ale House, Highgate High Street near the corner of South Grove, a few blocks north of Highgate Cemetery (ask any local in the neighborhood for directions), London; (unlisted telephone number).

Square and Compass, Worth Matravers, Dorset; tel. 0929-439229.

The Dove, 19 Upper Mall, Hammersmith, London; tel. 081-748-5405.

Woodforde’s Norfolk Ale brewery, Salhouse Road, Woodbastwick, Norfolk; tel. 0603-720353.

Yorkshire Grey, 2 Theobald’s Road, London; (Chancery Lane tube stop); tel. 071-405-2519.

Great British Beer Festival: For more information, write the Campaign for Real Ale, 34 Alma Road, St. Albans, Herfordshire, AL1 3BW, England; from the United States, telephone 011-44-0727-867201.

Books: An indispensable reference book for pub crawling (updated yearly) is the “Good Beer Guide 1994” (about $15), available from the Campaign for Real Ale; for information on ordering, call 011-44-727-867201 or purchase in major bookstores in England.

For more information: British Tourist Authority, 551 Fifth Ave., Suite 701, New York 10176, (800) GO2 BRITAIN.