Rooms at the inn

I went along to the Church Inn in Cheadle Hulme on Thursday evening as my local CAMRA branch, Stockport and South Manchester, was presenting a Pub of the Month award there.

The Church Inn, apparently the second pub to be acquired by Stockport brewery Robinsons, is an early nineteenth century building which was originally two separate cottages. There's a wood-panelled bar with a real fire as you enter, a dining area extending to the rear of the building and a snug behind and served by the same bar, accessible by a corridor alongside it, which seems mainly to be used for TV sports viewing. Thus, although a smallish, food-led pub, it manages to accomodate the needs of drinkers, diners and those there to watch football on TV. There are also a few tables outside at the front, a covered smoking area with another large TV at the rear and a small beer garden beyond that. You can dine in the bar, and outside in the summer months too I suppose, and they also sometimes have live, mostly acoustic, music in there at the weekend.

That a multi-room pub format works so well shouldn't really surprise us: George Orwell in his famous essay The Moon Under Water describes such a place, and you can still see that differentation between rooms in pubs and beerhalls across much of Germany, especially in the Rhineland and Bavaria.

The contrast here, of course, is with large, open plan pubs which scatter a sea of reserved signs on their tables, at which the drinker is barely tolerated and only admitted on condition that they stand at a small bar in a corner, but even some large, food-led pubs manage to welcome the casual caller dropping in for a pint, Wetherspoons being a good example of a place where drinkers and diners mix happily and where, unless it's for a large party of a special event, table reservations are neither generally accepted nor thought necessary to make by customers.