The town where I went to university, St Andrews, would, amongst its many claims to fame, assert that it had the most pubs per square foot of anywhere in Britain. Whatever the dubious truth of that, those pubs did not, at least in my day, match the beauty of the town.
Some of them were fine. I spent many happy hours etc ... but the best of them were perfunctorily cosy, the worst of them were rammed hellholes. Most of the pubs in St Andrews were either trying to attract students in to drink so much that they puked, or repel students so that locals could drink so much the puked.
Considering it is a town surrounded by sea, none of them had a sea view. I also don't remember there being any great pub gardens (tbf, I was there all year round apart from the summer but I just don't think they were there).
Apart from some twee golf theming in a few, most of them could have been anywhere, not in one of Britain's most distinctly beautiful towns. Looking back, there are only one or two I hold in any affection, and they were nothing other than well-run, not overly busy, Irish chain pubs which had a decent quiz machine.
Whereas the pubs of home, the pubs of summer, they were a fine bunch.
If I was to explain where I grew up in one pat phrase, I'd describe it as Fuller's country. Even as a child, when I wasn't interested in the product, the brand and its buildings were everywhere - Ealing, Chiswick, Barnes etc every other pub is a Fuller's pub. The brewery is in Chiswick. You can't miss it.
There was also the Mortlake brewery (not Fuller's, went through a few hands before closing in 2015) which we could sometimes smell from school. And if it wasn't Fuller's, especially heading further south, it was Young's (based in Wandsworth).
From my teens to my early 20s, it was nearly always the pubs clustered round both sides of the Thames in Hammersmith and Barnes. North of the river, The Black Lion, The Ship, The Dove, The Rutland, The Blue Anchor, The Old City Arms (there were also reasons to meet up in Hammersmith Broadway's less picturesque Hop Poles and William Morris, but let's ignore them for now). South of the River, The White Hart, The Bull's Head, The Sun Inn, The Red Lion, The Old Rangoon/Garden House/Brown's (now a nursery, I see), The Bridge (plus there were a couple of others I never went to).
They were good pubs. They had river views, gardens, good beer, people I knew. They'd been around for years and they knew they'd always have as many of West London's well to do young and old as they needed passing through.
I had good times in all of them. Usually not epic glorious nights filled with romance and intrigue, just pleasant enough evenings. The nights young men have. Occasionally some drama, but not much.
Then there's the Oxford and Cambridge. I passed by the Oxford and Cambridge, on my way somewhere else, around 5000 times (literally). And only ever felt the urge to go in once (it would have been a bit odd if I'd wanted to go in when I was an 8 year old boy on his way to school, but still ...). The day I went in was the last day of school. There were a lot of "last days of school" of course - last day before exams, last day of exams, exams result day - all of which involved celebratory trips to local pubs, but I'm pretty sure this was the official last day of school, and Wieland and I, for some reason, took ourselves to the Oxford and Cambridge at midday for one pint and a roll-up. We were the only people in there.
The Oxford and Cambridge was the saddest thing with its "hey, we're a boat race pub" name, with its vast separated desolation. It shut in 2006 for good, but in the 20 years before that, whenever I passed it, it never looked open. Where all those other pubs had, in their way, an ideal situation which made being a good pub hard to fuck up, the Oxford and Cambridge was so near but so far away, on Hammersmith Bridge Road, no more than a very short walk from the river, but on the corner which went up to the slip road to the Great West Road flyover. It was bleak, always bleak.
Perhaps it survived for decades because it served kids. Perhaps that's why Wieland and I went there that day. I don't recall. But the other places served kids too. And why would anyone ever go to the Oxford and Cambridge if they knew that the Rutland and Blue Anchor, with their outside rows of benches overlooking the sun setting idyllically on the Thames, were only a couple of hundred metres away?
Businesses, especially eating and drinking places, that don't work intrigue and sadden me. Usually you know immediately they've opened, wonder how long they'll struggle on, wonder if the owners know they're on to a loser. I remember going past a pub in some unprepossessing part of London, and the pub was called "Inn the Middle of Nowhere" and I thought, ha, ha, that's funny, and the pub was boarded up. And I thought haha that's funny, but in a different way.
Or sometimes there's a business that does work, that deserves to work, and then something changes, something out of their control, and you know they'll never work again. That happened for a really nice coffee shop in the town where I live now. I used to take the baby there when she was tiny and I was trying to get her to sleep. It was thriving, it was classy, it was packed. Then somewhere cheaper opened next door, a Wimpy-like chain place which does coffees and milk shakes and burgers and has big seating outside. Sometimes places can survive a healthy rival (eg the Blue Anchor and Rutland have been bang next door to each other for decades and it's never done either of them any harm), but the geography of the street just means the coffee shop, where once it was part of things, is cut off, sparse, miserable, and is just now in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Just like the Oxford and Cambridge.
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