Crown Inn glory

The Crown in Stockport reopened yesterday after a lengthy, and much needed, refurbishment by its new owners, the father and son who also run the Petersgate Tap between the station and marketplace, so I popped down last night to have a look.

Fifteen or so years ago, the Crown was Stockport's premier pub for cask beer, a multi handpump Victorian boozer beneath the town's famous railway viaduct which, despite not being the closest to the ground, often attracted away fans when their teams played at Edgeley Park (I was in there once on a Saturday dinnertime when a coachload of Southampton fans, whose side were briefly in the third tier, turned up having heard about its reputation for well kept real ale). But then the longtime landlord retired and the place began to drift a bit, a slow side into general shabbiness and average beer that in the last few years has seen a dizzying succession of short term licensees and sudden, unexplained closures.

Thankfully the pub is now in good hands again, with a smartened up look and cask range that I'm sure will get it back into the Good Beer Guide. It also now has Draught Bass as a permanent beer on the bar, which was flying out last night (they were already on their third cask of it!).

Roll Out the Barrel

I watched the Mets-Brewers baseball game on the BBC Red Button last night.

In the seventh inning stretch, when the crowd normally sings Take Me Out to the Ball Game, the Brewers fans sang Roll Out the Barrel. The lyrics ("Roll out the barrel, we'll have a barrel of fun") are of course perfect for the Milwaukee Brewers, and for drinking beer at the ballpark. 

They also went into the history of the song, which everyone seems to claim to have composed. I always assumed it was an English pub song (the British Film Institute once put out a DVD of short films about English pubs with that title), but it turns out to be based on a Czech polka instrumental from 1927. Czech lyrics were added in 1934, English ones by American songwriters for a hit in 1939, and then it was sung by soldiers in World War II.

Every day's a school day...

The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club

For the last few months on a Sunday night, Talking Pictures TV has been showing episodes of the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, a seventies variety show supposedly coming live from a Manchester working men's club, but actually filmed at the studios of Granada TV on a midweek afternoon (the audience seems to consist largely of pensioners, no doubt drawn by the trays with pints of keg bitter on them being constantly filled at the bar and carried round the room by the waitresses).

The first thing to say is that most of the turns aren't very good. Bernard Manning as compere confirms that not only wasn't he very funny but he couldn't sing either, crooning in a strange cod Las Vegas lounge style. The two things that make it watchable are the comedian Colin Crompton, as the stereotypical committee chairman who makes humorous announcements between the acts, and the stars from beyond the Northern club circuit whom the legendary Granada producer Johnnie Hamp somehow managed to attract, like Howard Keel and Karl Denver. There is also occasionally some jazz from the traditional end of the genre (Kenny Ball, George Melly).

Some ITV regions, especially those in the South, apparently refused to show the programme until the early hours, deeming it too broad for their allegedly more sophisticated audiences, and you can sort of see their point. If you want to know why variety died, here is your answer.

Beer and blues in the new Berlin

I went to Stockport beer festival last night, held for the third year in a row at the town's Masonic Guildhall (vale Edgeley Park: Stockport County's successes on the pitch, rising from National League North to EFL League One, and the subsequent redevelopment of the ground and its hospitality and conference facilities, have put it beyond the pocket of the organisers).

Stockport might not quite be the new Berlin, as an international DJ once dubbed it, but with a new bus station, which will now eventually become a tram interchange, a bridge across the Mersey from it to the Runaway microbrewery, which relocated there from Manchester, and some long shut pubs in that area reopening, the town is definitely on the up.

I tend to gravitate towards darker, stronger beers at festivals now, and amongst those I enjoyed last night were a strong dark mild brewed by Thornbridge, on the Burton Union system they acquired from Marston's, in collaboration with Brooklyn Brewery's Garrett Oliver, Krakow Prince, a porter from Poland's only cask beer brewery, and a smoked Redwillow Rauchbier.

On the way back to the station I popped into the Spinning Top, where a blues band was playing covers of some Chicago standards (Howlin' Wolf's Killing Floor, Jimmy Reed's Bright Lights, Big City). The Spinning Top, a music pub housed in a former Indian restaurant, is named after a short story by Franz Kafka, a quote from which is painted on the wall (Kafka spent some time in Berlin, but I don't think he ever made it to Stockport).

A river runs through it

Yesterday's announcement that the South Manchester line of the Metrolink tram system is to be extended from East Didsbury to Stockport was hardly unexpected, but welcome news nonetheless. There will also be new stops on existing sections of track, including one on the Bury line at the southern end of Rochdale Road in Collyhurst, part of a housing regeneration project already being built which will eventually extend north from Victoria station along the Irk Valley.

Like the rest of the South Manchester line, the extension to Stockport is essentially rebuilding something that existed from the late nineteenth century until the Beeching cuts to railway services in the sixties, although unlike the former Manchester South District Railway which ran along the north bank of the Mersey into the town the new track will now cross the river at some point, most likely from Heaton Mersey to Edgeley, passing close to the planned station at the eastern end of Cheadle village which should also be running passenger services by then.

That bridge will no doubt be the trickiest part of the project, work on which is due to start in 2027 and be completed by 2032. Will Stockport still be the new Berlin by then? Who knows, but hopefully I'll be around to see it and finally get to board a Stockport bound tram one day in the next decade or so.

Mild about Manchester

I went into Manchester city centre yesterday afternoon and completed my sticker card for Mild Magic, an annual event organised by Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA to promote mild ale.

I usually get off to a decent start by going on the pub crawl held to launch it, but this year my attempt to join it was, er, derailed by a freight train which caught fire and shut the Manchester Airport line for several hours.

In the end, I managed to get to sixteen pubs, about half of them tied houses of local breweries Holt's and Hydes (who sponsor the event) and the others a mixture of micropubs and Wetherspoons. Seven were in the city centre, five in the SK8 postcode area, and four in south Manchester (along the Metrolink line of that name from East Didsbury to Withington).

The beer quality was generally good, with just one poor and another returned as undrinkable. I voted for the Bank Top Dark Mild I had at the Wobbly Stamp in Cheadle as the best mild, and the City Arms in Manchester as the best pub.

Agatha at Abney

I had a stroll around Abney Hall Country Park in Cheadle the other day after seeing a BBC documentary about Agatha Christie in which Lucy Worsley also visited it.

Abney Hall was built in the mid nineteenth century by businessman James Watts, who owned a large warehouse on Portland Street in Manchester, around the time he became mayor of the city (a Hydes pub a few hundred yards south of it in Cheadle village is now named after him). Agatha Christie's older sister married his grandson, also called James Watts, and as a child in the early twentieth century she spent a lot of time there, eventually writing one of her first books while stopping for Christmas at the hall, which became a model for country houses in her subsequent detective novels. It was also where she retreated in the mid twenties after the episode in which she went missing as her first marriage broke down and was found at a Harrogate hotel having suffered some kind of memory loss, and from where she set out with her sister in law to a furniture sale in Marple, inspiring the name of her elderly female detective.

One thing I hadn't thought about before seeing the documentary was how close the railway line runs to the grounds of the hall, something which features in her novel 4.50 from Paddington. Cheadle station, where Agatha's family would have alighted on trips north from their home in Torquay, shut towards the end of World War I, although the junction where it stood in the early twentieth century still looks very similar and there are now plans to build a new station at the same location.