After nineteen months of cultural enrichment travelling the world between late 2008 and mid-2010, I determined to ensure my return to the greatest city in the solar system™ did not result in immediate philistinism. To that end, I revisited a handful of the big galleries and some of the major museums as well as journeying to England’s great centres of learning in my twenty four weeks in the United Kingdom but it was my efforts as regards those smaller institutions of cultivation, the public houses (and the tasting of the beverages within), which may be judged – by others, naturally, for I would not presume to assert thus – to have reached the status of ‘art’.[1]
Ultimately, the one hundred and sixty seven days I remained in England occasioned the visitation of three hundred and fifteen such establishments. Fourteen lay outside the boundaries of Greater London and it is the other three hundred and one which constitute the pool from which I draw the observations and opinions that make up my next log entries. The reputable organisation CAMRA asserts that the capital maintains approximately five thousand seven hundred public houses but other sources count as many as seven thousand. I hope I will be allowed, therefore, to claim that my summer jaunts in the name of art and culture took me to somewhere in the region of five percent of all London pubs.Sadly, it has been reported in the venerable Times of London that British public houses are becoming defunct at the rate of fifty two per week. For that reason it is appropriate before listing to mourn a paragon of ale houses, the “Black Horse” in Fitzrovia which served an impressive range (it was a Nicholson’s pub) when I visited on twentieth June but which will quench travellers’ thirst no more.
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