Golden Pints 2022

Having read Boak and Bailey's, I was inspired to put together my own list of favourite beery things from 2022. I like the subtitle of their post, "notes on an almost normal year": despite the final Covid restrictions being lifted at the end of January, it's been another tough year for the beer industry as soaring energy prices and other rising costs have seen pubs and breweries shut and drinkers' pockets hit.

Looking back at the first time I did this in 2013, and the last in 2017, I saw how little some of my answers have changed in the last decade. I'm not sure if that indicates a reassuring adherence to tradition, or a worrying failure to explore new things...

Pub 

I've only been to half a dozen pubs this year, mostly my local – either side of yet another refurbishment by Holt's in November – and a few other food-led places within walking distance, including on a CAMRA crawl in July which also saw my first visit to a newish micropub, as well as a couple of multi-cask specialist free houses in Stockport, the Magnet, where I spent a memorable afternoon in September, and the one I'm going to give the prize to, Ye Olde Vic in Edgeley, whose twenty-one years in the Good Beer Guide we celebrated in August.

Draught beer 

Holt's Bitter: despite progressively wrecking my local in the last twenty years, the north Manchester brewery still produces a top cask pint.

Bottled beer 

Fuller's 1845 is still my favourite British bottled beer. I've also enjoyed a few bottles of Guinness Foreign Extra Stout and Schlenkerla Rauchmärzen.

Festival

I only went to one, Stockport in June, the last at Edgeley Park, at least for now, before the move to the Masonic Hall in 2023.

Blog 

I've read two pretty much every day, Ron Pattinson's Shut Up About Barclay Perkins and Retired Martin, whose posts from the Rhineland I particularly enjoyed, as well as BRAPA, Boak and Bailey, Paul Bailey, Pub Curmudgeon, Tandleman and Zythophile as they published on theirs. Cooking Lager deserves a special mention for this post about the pubs of Reddish.

London Calling?

Yet another review into the future of rugby league, this time by consultants IMG, has concluded that what the sport really needs is a top flight London team, pointing to the healthy attendance at Arsenal's stadium for England's World Cup semi-final against Samoa last month, in contrast to a lower turnout for their opening match of the competition in Newcastle.

The idea of a London club in the top flight of rugby league is not a new one: Wigan Highfield relocated to the White City stadium in the early thirties and Fulham FC established a side to play at their Craven Cottage ground in the early eighties, while semi-professional teams London Broncos and Skolars still exist lower down the league structure, the former having played in the Super League before.

There has always been a tension in rugby league between concentrating resources on the game's Northern heartlands and attempting to extend its appeal beyond them, which in the twentieth century was reflected in a long debate amongst its governing bodies as to whether the Challenge Cup Final should be played at Wembley, and while some expansion projects have flourished, notably Australasia and France, others have spectacularly foundered, including Paris, Newcastle, Wales and Toronto, although the last was really scuppered by the travel restrictions brought in at the start of the Covid pandemic rather than a lack of public interest.

The game's authorities have two groups of supporters in mind for a London team: rugby league fans from the North who now live there, and potential new converts from rugby union, who they think can be won over by the sport's innate strengths (tough tackling, speedy passing and running with the ball, and an emphasis on try scoring rather than penalties, scrums and kicking into touch), as well as the kind of casual spectator who turned up at Arsenal's stadium a few weeks ago, and has largely filled the seats for the NFL International Series since it was first played in the capital in 2007, and which has also led to calls for a team in North America's biggest sports competition to be (re)located here.

Ultimately what a London based club really needs to take off though is a production line running through schools, junior amateur sides and its own academy to provide a stream of talented young players, rather than having to rely on expensive imports from the North and Australasia.

Books of the Year

I seem to have read a few more books than normal this year, partly because I've got into online and eBooks (Project Gutenberg is a good resource for that). Many of my choices have been inspired by watching TV or film adaptations of novels.

The Adventures of Phillip by William Makepeace Thackeray

I started the year with the sequel to the unfinished novel I ended 2021 with, A Shabby Genteel Story.

The Path to Rome by Hilaire Belloc 

Belloc was a great walker and this travel journal with his own illustrations documents the pilgrimage he made in 1902 from Toul, the French town where he had completed his military service, to Rome.

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

I've had this on my bookshelves for years, and finally got round to reading it after seeing another TV adaptation of it. 

The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni

A very topical novel set in a plague struck seventeenth century Lombardy, with both religious and class themes.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

I read this after watching the film, which has significant plot differences from the novel. Steinbeck interleaves his tale of Dust Bowl refugees in thirties California with political commentary generalising from the experiences of its characters.

Don't Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier

A classic example of how you can turn a longish short story  into a two hour film.

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust

Having read Swann's Way, the first volume of Proust's famously long novel In Search of Lost Time, I moved onto the second, in which the upper class Parisian characters travel to a Normandy seaside resort for the summer.

The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France

France appears as a character in Proust, which led me to this, his best known work.

The Card by Arnold Bennett

Having lived in Stoke as a student in the early nineties, I recognised many of the locations in this Potteries-set comic novel about an ambitious young man.

Walking the Woods and the Water by Nick Hunt

A modern recreation of Patrick Leigh Fermor's classic interwar tramp across Central Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople.

The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musill

Also set in Central Europe, at a military academy on the edge of the Austria-Hungarian empire before WWI, this novel strongly prefigures the militarism and fascism about to overwhelm the continent.

Hell Is A City by Maurice Proctor

I blogged about the film based on this Mancunian detective thriller here, although there's a major plot difference at the end of the novel.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

I think we all know what this book is about.

Ritual by David Pinner

The novel on which the film The Wicker Man is loosely based, although again there are major plot differences.

Adam Bede/Felix Holt/Middlemarch by George Eliot

A midsummer blitz of works by the English Midlands most famous novelist.

The Professor/Villette by Charlotte Brontë

Some unkind critics have claimed that this is really the same novel written twice, one with a male and the other a female protagonist, and both draw on the author's experiences teaching at a school in Brussels.

The Last Man by Mary Shelley

Political crisis wracks England as a mysterious virus from the Far East sweeps across Europe and climate change threatens human existence in this prophetic sci-fi novel.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John Le Carré

Somewhat ironically, I read this Cold War spy thriller straight through while sheltering indoors on the hottest day of the year.

The Decembrists/The Devil by Leo Tolstoy

An unfinished sequel to the much longer War and Peace, although started before it, and a short story about a love triangle involving a rich young man who inherits a country estate.

The Misfits by Arthur Miller

A cinematic novel based on the screenplay for the modern Western which was the last film of both Miller's then wife Marilyn Monroe and her co-star Clark Gable.

The Attack on the Mill/The Flood/The Fête at Coqueville by Émile Zola

Having  read most of his Rougon-Macquart series of novels, I whipped through a few of Zola's short stories, the first two about disasters striking rural communities, and the last a comedy about washed up barrels of wine overcoming ancient enmities in a Normandy fishing village.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Grahame based the character of Toad in his Thamesside children's story on the politician Horatio Bottomley, but his boundless ego and reckless self-promotion inevitably brings to mind the first of this year's three Prime Ministers.

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

You can't read this novel, which combines espionage, comedy, romance and religion, without thinking of the title character in the film version played by Alec Guinness (like Greene, a convert to Catholicism who often struggled with his faith).

 

 

Advance Australia's Pair

A day before the football World Cup kicks off atop the graves of thousands of migrant workers killed building the stadia for it in Qatar, the Australian men's and women's teams both lifted the top prize in a double header final of the Rugby League World Cup at Old Trafford this afternoon.

You could probably have put both Australian teams down as trophy winners before they boarded the plane from the Antipodes; the only real surprise was that it was Samoa that the men's team beat in the final, after the Pacific Islanders' shock extra time golden point drop goal victory against hosts England in the semi-final at Arsenal's stadium last Saturday afternoon.

The dominance of Australia in international rugby league - with a dozen World Cup wins out of the fifteen contested since the first in France in 1954 - is down to a number of things: the Australasian NRL is the top level, and highest paid, domestic competition in the world, attracting the best young players from both Europe and the Pacific Islands; League is not only the leading rugby code in Australia, but also the foremost sport in the big cities on its eastern coast, with youth systems feeding a stream of talent into its clubs and the national side; and in the women's game, the female version of the NRL is now fully professional, hence the achievement of England's semi-pro women in reaching a semi-final against today's runners-up New Zealand.

There's lots to celebrate from this World Cup, including the emergence of Pacific Island quarter finalists Tonga and Samoa alongside established rugby league nation Papua New Guinea, the expansion of the women's competition, and England winning the wheelchair final at Manchester Central last night - I'm already looking forward to the 2025 tournament in France.

Champion Ale

I picked up a bottle of McEwan's Champion Ale from Sainsbury's last week. I'd seen mixed reviews of it online, but you can't really go wrong at £1.50 for almost a pint of a 7.3% beer. A strong ale in the Scottish "wee heavy" style, it was first sold in 1998 after winning a competition, hence the name, and is the British version of a beer brewed for the Belgian market, 8% Gordon's Scotch Ale.

William McEwan's, who began brewing at Fountainbridge on the outskirts of Edinburgh in 1856, joined the twentieth century merry-go-round of brewery mergers and acquisitions by linking up with local rivals William Younger's to form Scottish Brewers in 1931, before becoming part of Scottish & Newcastle in 1960 (one of my childhood memories is of driving into Manchester along Princess Parkway past their Moss Side brewery with the McEwan's Laughing Cavalier on the side) and then Heineken in 2008; their beers are now brewed by Marston's at the former Wells & Young Eagle Brewery in Bedford.

The label describes the beer as "smooth, full-bodied and complex", and it's certainly that. The first thing that hits you as you pour it into the glass is the waft of alcohol. There's quite a pronounced metallic taste and some sherryish notes, a bit like Fuller's 1845, one of the few remaining Burton ales, a style not a million miles away from Scottish "wee heavy".

I expect a few similar beers will be brewed for the coronation of King Charles III next summer.

Up for the Cup?

I watched Australia's 84-0 demolition of Scotland in the Rugby League World Cup last night, in front of a sparse crowd in that hotbed of the sport, Coventry.

Surely the time has come for a two-tier competition in which the lower ranked nations play amongst themselves before one of them joins the three top teams, Australia, New Zealand and England, in the knockout stages.  I'm all for spreading and developing the game around the world, but one-sided contests like last night's don't help anyone.

The sport should probably also look at excluding some of the artificial teams that are now turning up to World Cups, representing countries where the game isn't played at professional level and there's little public interest in it (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Jamaica, Greece, Italy and Lebanon), made up of players who hail from Sydney or Salford rather than Sorrento or Skiathos and are the distant descendants of immigrants from them, making them in effect Australia and England "B" sides.

Australia's opening match at Headingley last Saturday night was also sparsely attended, despite Leeds being on the M62 corridor that runs through rugby league's heartlands. The postponement of the competition because of Covid and rising inflation have both pushed up costs, just as the disposable income of fans has dipped,  and the price of tickets is now likely to be beyond the pockets of many diehards, let alone the casual spectator outside the areas where the game has traditionally been played who might otherwise have been prepared to pay for one as a one-off experience. 

Heading for trouble

I watched a TV programme last night in which the former England rugby union hooker Steve Thompson, now 42, described the distressing effects early onset dementia is having on him, his wife and their young children.

Brain damage caused by repeated blows to or pressure on the head is an issue for several professional sports and has also been linked to motor neurone disease. The things he called for – longer breaks between matches, no concussive collisions in training sessions and better care of players during and after their careers – would obviously be welcome, but I get the feeling that they aren't going to be enough and far more radical solutions will be needed for these sports to continue without inflicting more misery on those taking part in them in future.

One of the problems he identified is that not only are rugby players, both league and union, running at each other faster than before but they're also much bigger, so weight restrictions are probably now needed, as well as an end to contested scrums. American football will have to ban helmets too, football heading (the lighter ball doesn't seem to make much difference) and boxing shots to the head. It'll make for very different games, but better that than the ongoing carnage we're seeing now.

The Queen in Stockport

I happened to be in a pub in Stockport, meeting up with a few mates who I hadn't seen for a couple of years because of Covid, when the news came that the Queen had died, almost a fortnight ago now.

I knew when I left home to catch the train to Stockport that the Queen was seriously ill and that it was possible she might die in the next few hours, and wondered what would happen if she did – would the pub shut, or people sit silently over their drinks in a mournful atmosphere? – but in the end a bloke at the bar asked his mate if he thought they'd get the day off for the funeral and they laughed and things carried on pretty much as normal. Later, we walked back down the hill to the station and there were groups of people coming along Wellington Road in high spirits on an evening out, which would have been unthinkable seventy years ago I reckon.

Funnily enough, the only time I saw the Queen, quite by accident, was at Stockport station in 2004, when I was dropping some relatives off there and her train came in on the next platform - she was on her way to what was then the Royal Manchester School for the Deaf, and I to work as one of her civil servants at the social security office across the road, where, given my republican sympathies, the telling of my encounter with our employer was met with some mirth.

I'd travelled into Stockport on the train a couple of times before in the last few months, for the beer festival at the football ground and the evening at Ye Olde Vic to celebrate it having been in the Good Beer Guide for 21 years, but on both occasions had left the station by the approach on the Edgeley side, so hadn't seen the new buildings around it or the bus interchange going up in the shell of the old one.

Ye Olde Vic: 21 not out

I went to Ye Olde Vic in Edgeley last night, for an evening on which Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA celebrated it having been in the Good Beer Guide for 21 years in a row.

As I wrote here, after my first visit to it in 2015, for years I thought that when people talked about the derelict looking pub at the top of the approach behind Stockport station, they were referring to the imposing, but long closed, and now converted for other use, Blue Bell Hotel rather than Ye Olde Vic just down the hill.

It's actually only a few weeks since my last visit, having popped in for a pint en route to the station after Stockport Beer and Cider Festival at Edgeley Park, and its unique atmosphere of a street corner local largely frequented by regulars rather than destination pub visitors cum eclectic bric-à-brac emporium and the well-kept cask beer which has led to it long appearing in the Good Beer Guide were the same on both occasions.

Another draw last night was the presence on the bar of Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby Mild, the strong mild ale created by a widow of that name in 1921 that disappeared for thirty years until the recipe for it was rediscovered by her grandson in the late 80s, which, combined with a cheese and onion cob in its home at the Beacon Hotel, Sedgley, was one of the highlights of my holiday to the Black Country a decade ago.

Farewell Neighbours

The Australian soap Neighbours came to an end last night with a special hour-long finale.

I've been watching Neighbours since it started in the mid 80s, at first the dinnertime episode on a tiny TV in a classroom at secondary school, and then the teatime one in a shared student house in the early 90s (one of my lecture shy housemates always used to get up especially for it).

While ratings have inevitably dropped since their late 80s peak, the real reason that Channel 5 - who took over the show from the BBC in 2008 and underwrote its production since - has finally pulled the plug is that it's now cheaper for it to make its own programmes - like their inferior remake of All Creatures Great and Small - and then sell them to the US networks, rather than buying them in from elsewhere.

The appeal of Neighbours has always been that it's sunny, breeezy and light, a youthful, upbeat and optimistic contrast to, and escape from, the gloomy, divided Thatcherite Britain of the 80s and now, politics having come almost full circle, our post-Brexit fate of isolation and decline, and although the show became more issue-driven of late it never lost its balance of drama and comedy, and thankfully never descended to the unrelenting grimness of Eastenders or, having chosen to ape it, Coronation Street, which has broken from its roots in Northern working-class humour and transformed itself into a completely different programme more akin to a Salford-set equivalent of The Wire.

Another look at the Moss Nook and Heald Green pub scene

The first local CAMRA event cancelled at the start of lockdown in March 2020 was a pub crawl around Moss Nook and Heald Green; on Friday night, more than two years behind schedule, it finally happened.

The record breaking temperatures at the start of the week had thankfully been replaced by the overcast skies and light drizzle more normal for Manchester, making for a pleasant mile and a half stroll around this mostly residential suburban area at the edge of the airport and Cheshire countryside, extending along the southern border of the city and into the neighbouring borough of Stockport.

With the original starting point, Robinson’s Tatton Arms, closed for refurbishment, four of us assembled at the nearby Flying Horse, a chain dining pub which opened at the end of 2013. A pump-clip for Greene King IPA greeted us on the bar, but it turned out not to be available, and with our next call at the Heald Green Hotel (an inter-war Whitbread pub, and keg-only haunt of mine when I was a teenager in the late eighties) equally brief – a plastic pint pot atop the single hand-pump for Doom Bar signalled its unavailability, gruffly confirmed by the barman – after fifteen minutes we’d been to two pubs without drinking a drop of beer – as someone said, the evening was becoming less of a pub crawl and more like a Temperance tour!

Luckily, Brew HG, a café/bar in a former florist’s shop on the other side of the railway station, gave us a friendly welcome, seats at a table outside and a craft beer menu that included a few Belgian bottle-conditioned strong ales – it could almost have been Brussels if it hadn’t been for the aircraft about to land at the airport descending overhead; they also had German lagers and wheat beers in bottles and Beavertown Neck Oil IPA on draught at the bar. One to return to I think.

Having phoned ahead to confirm its availability, we were assured of cask beer in the form of freshly pulled through Doom Bar at the Cheadle Royal, a modern, low-rise building on a business park at the opposite end of the village, with which it shares its name as well as with the adjacent Victorian psychiatric hospital.

Our final call was at the Griffin, my local in the nineties and early noughties, when it was a typically squat, and smoky, sixties-built estate pub, since transformed by Holt’s into an airy food-led place once described as looking like Southfork Ranch, where we found their bitter in good condition, an upbeat end to an evening which had begun with an inauspicious series of swift retreats before improving in both hospitability and beer quality.

The Sherwood Foresters

I've just finished watching Sherwood, the BBC drama set in a former Nottinghamshire pit village still split by the 1984-85 miners' strike, at the edge of the eponymous forest into which a young bow and arrow-wielding murderer flees (Robin Hood isn't the only literary reference - the Metropolitan Police spies sent into the coalfield at the start of the strike with the identities of dead children assume codenames of Romantic poets including Keats, Wordsworth and Byron, who lived nearby at Newstead Abbey, where the investigators meet the National Union of Mineworkers' lawyer to discuss their undercover operations).

The plot combines a crime drama based on two real, but unconnected, killings in the same area, revealing the identity of the murderers from the start and focussing more on their motivations, with a slower uncovering of secrets in the backgrounds and personal lives of the police and petty criminal characters.

The series sketches some of the background to the bitterness, with flashbacks to the 1984-85 strike when Nottinghamshire's pits and a big majority of its thirty thousand miners worked throughout the year long dispute as flying pickets from Yorkshire to the north clashed with police dispatched to confront them from the south. Although the Nottinghamshire Area of the NUM had always been on the right of the union, and split from it at the end of the strike (as it had after the 1926 General Strike), their ostensible reason for not joining the strike (the failure to call a national ballot) was always a pretty threadbare excuse, with thick seams of coal, modern mines and good wages meaning that they felt safe from the closure programme which would decimate the industry elsewhere in the country by the late 80s (they weren't: in 1992, the Tory government, which had lauded them as heroes in 1984-85 and promised them jobs for life, turned on them and shut their pits down too).

There are a couple of nice beer references: the NUM stalwart and murder victim who orders a pint of mix (mild and bitter) and the leader of the striking Yorkshire miners who bemoans the lack of Tetley's in the local club when they come down on a coach for his memorial.

Guinness is good for youth?

Channel Four's Inside the Superbrands last night looked at the world's most popular stout, and major Irish export, Guinness.

When I started drinking in pubs as a teenager in the late 80s, I occasionally drank bottle-conditioned Extra Stout as well as the cask bitter in my local Holt's house, or Draught Guinness in keg-only places, but since the former became a filtered and pasteurised, and to my palate rather thin, product and the latter is now usually sold in the Extra Cold form that tastes of nothing, the only version I really still like is bottled Foreign Extra Stout, which is much closer in both strength and mouthfeel to the original Extra Stout.

There was a bit about the alleged continuity of their brewing methods which I found a little hard to believe when they were standing next to a row of shiny new, sealed stainless steel vessels, but I didn't spot any of the many myths about Guinness which often pop up in things like this. There was also an interesting section about how the famous Guinness adverts began in the late 20s (although I thought they might have mentioned the Anglo-Irish Trade War just after that, which led to Guinness building a brewery at Park Royal in west London, too).

The programme spent a lot of time discussing Guinness's lack of appeal to young people in Britain and Ireland and the likely impact of this on future consumption of the beer, although as long as it still sells well in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean I can't see the company being too threatened by that, and despite the marketing spiel rolled out by PR agencies and pluggers I'm still unconvinced that the key to attracting them is the non-alcoholic Guinness Zero which they launched a couple of years ago.

Stockport(er) in the sunshine

After a three year break because of Covid, Stockport Beer and Cider Festival kicked off at Edgeley Park football ground with a trade session yesterday afternoon.

A couple of things had changed since my last visit to the home of the Hatters back in the summer of 2019: Stockport County are now a Football League club again, and the Cheadle End where the festival is held has been redeveloped, although the concourse under the stand where the bars are wasn't as different as I'd expected.

I drank mostly darker, stronger beers - Kirkstall X Mild, based on a recipe from 1885, Redwillow Heritage Porter and Stockport Stock Porter - as well as Kerala IPA from the former Howard Town, now Distant Hills Brewery, in Glossop. I also popped to the bottled beer bar in one of the function rooms at the top of the stand, whose temporary licence now allows off sales, and picked up a couple of my favourite smoked German lager Schlenkerla.

On the way back to the station we popped into the Olde Vic, somewhere else I hadn't been to for a few years, and had a pint in the beer garden there. One of Stockport's first freehouses and a longtime Good Beer Guide pub, it seemed to be doing a decent post-festival trade.

 

Going green with Stella

I finally succumbed to the advertising this week and picked up a few green labelled bottles of the new unfiltered Stella Artois from the supermarket.

First of all a confession: at the risk of shredding my beer credentials, I quite enjoy normal Stella and have drunk it in cans and bottles at parties and while watching sports events on TV and on draught in keg only pubs. Like a few other - mostly German - mass market pils (Becks, Radeberger, Warsteiner) it still has some hoppiness and isn't as sweet or gassy as certain Australian, French and Canadian brands.

Unfiltered Stella isn't actually that different, maybe slightly cloudier, but with no yeast deposit at the bottom of the bottle. Like the normal, filtered Stella, it's brewed under licence here, but at 5% rather than 4.6% abv (still slightly weaker than the 5.2% Belgian brewed beer which I've occasionally seen bottles of in local off licences).

O Caledonia

Heineken is to shut the Caledonian Brewery in Edinburgh, leaving the Scottish capital without a large brewery for the first time since the eighteenth century (a host of English cities are in the same position, including Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle and Nottingham, and London might ultimately join them following the Asahi takeover of Fuller's). 

Founded in 1869 by George Lorimer and Robert Clark, Caledonian has passed through a number of hands since, being acquired by Sunderland's now defunct Vaux Brewery in 1939 and Scottish and Newcastle in 2004, not long before S&N were themselves taken over by the Dutch megabrewer Heineken in 2008.

As part of the S&N/Heineken portfolio, Caledonian's Deuchars IPA became a nationally distributed brand - at one point, it seemed to be on the bar of every Wetherspoons pub you went in - and still ranks in the top ten cask beers by sales.

Caledonian beers will now be contract brewed at the Greene King-owned Belhaven Brewery in Dunbar, although I wouldn't be surprised if, like Manchester's Boddingtons Bitter, they eventually embark on an odyssey of multinational breweries where once famous regional beers eke out a strange half life in keg or cask form.

Only Connect

Since the start of the first lockdown in the spring of 2020, I've contributed a few bits and pieces to a local history website. One of the things that has emerged from the discussions on the Facebook page related to it is the link between farming in the area and the Stockport brewery Robinson's.

William Robinson was born in Northenden, then a farming village on the southern bank of the Mersey in north Cheshire, in 1800. In 1838, he bought the Unicorn Inn, built on Lower Hillgate, Stockport, in 1722, which he'd been landlord of since 1826. He left the pub in the hands of his son George in the mid eighteen forties, after the death of his first wife, remarried and moved to High Grove Farm in Heald Green, where he owned 41 acres (see the 1841 tithe map and 1851 census below). George brewed the first Robinson's beer in the backyard of the Unicorn in 1849 and became the licensee in 1850, relinquishing it in 1859 when his younger brother Frederic took over. The pub closed at the end of 1935 and was then demolished to make way for an extension of the brewery, with a plaque now marking the spot on the wall of the brewery yard (let's hope it survives the upcoming sale of the site when brewing moves to Robinson's bottling and canning plant in Bredbury).

There is still a Robinson's Farm in the Heald Green area, although I don't know if it's linked to the William Robinson who started the Stockport pub and brewing company in the late eighteen thirties and farmed here in the eighteen forties and fifties.  I suppose we shouldn't be surprised by the connection between farming and brewing given that the process begins by mashing malted barley.

Census returns from The History of Robinson's Brewery by Dr Lynn F. Pearson, 1997

(S)pot the difference

A photo popped up yesterday in an online Manchester history group I belong to of a mustard pot almost certainly connected to the large community of German cotton merchants and factory owners that flourished in the city in the nineteenth century, the best known of whom was Marx's pal/financer Friedrich Engels (the foundations of the Albert Club, Chorlton-on-Medlock, named after the German prince who married Queen Victoria, where he drank Pilsner beer with other emigrés in between riding to hounds with the Cheshire Hunt, were discovered in the course of building works a few years ago).

As you can see from the images below, it's pretty similar in shape to the one I snapped the last time I was in the Rhineland in 2015 in Brauerei Schumacher near Düsseldorf's central station (the pub where I finally got to drink a glass of Altbier on my first trip there in 2009).

A view from the bridge

One of my old school friends has just posted some images online from an exhibition he's involved with in Wigan, including the photo below taken outside Central Park rugby league ground in the early eighties.

My grandmother grew up with her uncle and auntie in a pub in Wigan, and after he died worked with her in a sweet shop near Central Park which later became a souvenir shop for the rugby league club. As kids in the seventies, we visited the sweet shop and then walked into the ground through an open exit gate and stood on the empty terraces.

So many questions spring to mind when looking at the photo of the people enjoying a free, if obstructed, view of the pitch: can they no longer afford to pay for admission to the ground at the turnstiles? (unemployment was rising sharply then, especially in the North West); have they stopped to watch the whole match, or just briefly on the way to or from somewhere else, like the guy on the bike?; has the yellow plastic traffic cone just fallen over in the road, or been kicked over for some reason?; what do the spectators on the adjacent terracing think of those watching the action for nothing?

Strangeways Here We Come

Channel 5 showed a documentary last night about the 1990 Strangeways prison riot.

The month long sit-in on the roof of the massively overcrowded Victorian gaol just north of Manchester city centre, during which much of the fabric of the building was destroyed, became something of an attraction, both locally and for the national media, sparking a debate about prison conditions, and leading to some improvements at the rebuilt and renamed HMP Manchester when it reopened in 1994 (notably toliets in the cells), although those who organised the protest ended up spending many more years behind bars as a result of it. One of them, already serving a life sentence, described the experience of emerging on the roof above the rotunda, overlooking the tower which was popularly, but wrongly, thought to have housed the gallows before hanging was abolished (it's actually a ventilation shaft), seeing the outside world for the first time in almost a decade and feeling human again (the other iconic landmark on the Strangeways skyline, the chimney of Boddingtons Brewery, finally came down in 2010, three years after the rest of the building was demolished).

Among the other changes at the new HMP Manchester was a ban on prison officers belonging to far right groups, before which National Front badges had been worn openly on the wings, and the closure of the social club where some of them drank heavily at dinnertime.

The prison population has increased dramatically since the 1990s and now stands above eighty thousand, so that, despite the privately-run HMP Forest Bank opening in Salford in 2000, on the site of the former Agecroft power station, as another local prison and remand facility, Strangeways has again become dangerously overcrowded and is still a place where prisoners are merely contained rather than rehabilitated.

Czeching out some Bohemian beers

With normal exporters Beer Dome not delivering to the UK at the moment because of Brexit-related customs problems, I had a look elsewhere for Czech beer online and found Halusky, an importer/retailer based in southwest London. Their mixed box of bottled beers includes a couple I've drunk before, Budvar and Pilsner Urquell, which I've also had on draught, and a couple I hadn't, from the Velkopopovicky Kozel brewery just south of Prague (if you didn't know already, the bearded billies quaffing beer on the labels is a fairly big clue that Kozel is the Czech word for goat).

Velkopopovicky Kozel 10° Svetlé Vycepni

Very pale/gold with a sweet, honeyish malt taste, but quite bitter, well carbonated, and a rather thin mouthfeel – a pretty basic lager to be honest.

Velkopopovicky Kozel Cerny

Again quite a thin mouthfeel, and a small white head, but an instant coffee hit very much like a stout and black in colour too – my kind of beer.

When the Covid pandemic is finally over, I really need to go to the Czech Republic and drink unpasteurised draught beer in a tankovna pub there.

 

Hell Is A City

I watched Hell Is A City, a 1960 black and white crime drama starring Stanley Baker and shot in Manchester, on Talking Pictures TV yesterday afternoon (I'd seen clips from it before, but never the whole film).

As part of the British New Wave, the film marks a shift away from the cosiness of Dixon of Dock Green and Gideon of the Yard towards a grittier Northern realism, exemplified by another police procedural, Z Cars, set in a fictional Lancashire new town based on Kirkby, which began in 1962. Stanley Baker does a good job at playing the tough Inspector, although his Mancunian accent veers back once or twice to that of his native South Wales, as does Donald Pleasance as on-course bookmaker Gus (echoes there of the famous Manchester bookie Gus Demmy, whose off-course betting operation would become legal in 1961), who is targetted in a bungled street robbery en route to a race meeting at Doncaster and the body of his clerk dumped on the moors between Manchester and Sheffield, scene of much darker crimes a few years later. Doris Speed makes a cameo appearance as a starchy hospital nurse not unlike her more famous role as Coronation Street landlady Annie Walker.

There are lots of still recognisable locations in and around the city centre to spot, including Piccadilly Gardens, Central Station and Strangeways Prison, but the pub which the police and criminals frequent - with its bottled beer, separate rooms, and waiters in the better ones, superintended by a landlord played by George Cooper (who would go on to appear in Z Cars) - disappeared with the rest of that area when the Arndale Centre was built.