Back in the 1980s, one of those firms that doesn\u2019t actually do anything but owns all sorts of things bought the rights to use the name of that old stalwart of Scottish brewing, Belhaven. It bought up lots of bottom of the range Truman\u2019s pubs across London and put \u2018Belhaven\u2019 on the front. They had one distinctive feature. It was a single, vertical, brass coloured pipe on the bar that fed six taps on a cross pipe. One Guinness; one keg bitter; one keg cider; three keg lagers. Not the sort of place London Drinker readers would go to. The nearest to me had its fifteen minutes of fame when, in 1993, someone was shot dead in the bar and the Belhaven estate rather fell away about then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was the Royal on Victoria Park and, like the others around the park, it wasn\u2019t built by Truman\u2019s but by the Crown Estate. Consequently, it didn\u2019t have the Truman\u2019s look, like the Hare in Mare Street or the Royal Oak in Columbia Road Market. The same goes for the Crown, on the south side of the park. The Royal is now a Remarkable pub and the Crown is now a Young\u2019s pub.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In decades long gone, Young\u2019s were a refuge from Watney\u2019s pubs with their red stripe, Courage pubs with their blue stripe, Whitbread pubs with their brown stripe or Charrington pubs with their Toby Jug. But, alas, the curse of the corporate style manual has struck. The Times reported on 9 January that Young\u2019s have run into opposition to their policy of replacing their pub signs with a uniform design that just has the initial letter of the pub on a plain background. The result is that the Crown and the nearby Coburn Arms have pretty much the same sign. What the Times doesn\u2019t mention is that the internal d\u00e9cor of Young\u2019s pubs has also undergone the same process of homogenisation. The Crown and the Coburn are blighted by funereal colours, oppressively over ornate ceilings, hideous light fittings and an obsession with high tables and inaccessible high stools and benches. At least the Lamb, in Bloomsbury, which it uses to illustrate its coverage, has a listed interior and so should be safe from this vandalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is always a temptation for owners to crush any individuality in their pubs and to impose a house style. They steamroller flat anything that is distinctive so that people know what to expect. And this isn\u2019t just the big, faceless owners either. An Antic pub is always distressed furniture and exposed brickwork. But the mess Young\u2019s have made of their signs policy is one little symptom of a wider problem that requires us to dig in and press on for continued distinction for each and every pub.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then there\u2019s the matter of Young\u2019s weird Geronimo food but that\u2019s for another day. Back in the 1980s, one of those firms that doesn\u2019t actually do anything but owns all sorts of things bought the rights to use the name of that old stalwart… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3252,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3251"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3253,"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251\/revisions\/3253"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londondrinker.camra.org.uk\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Nik Wood<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"