It's a conundrum. Looking back through previous posts, HvNP almost looks like a review blog and that was never my original intention so I've decided to talk about some other stuff to break things up a bit. One of my passions, as everyone who knows me will attest to, is pubs.
I've been thinking a lot about places I used to go when I was a young whipper-snapper growing up in South-West Essex and it occurred to me that a lot of the pubs seemed to have disappeared - part of the general malaise in the pub industry at the moment. Maybe that's a post all in itself but for now, here is a misty-eyed recollection of the Castle, a proper pub now sadly lost to a terrible night club.
I grew up in a small, sleepy commuter town just to the north-east of Romford. Brentwood was once named (by Richard Littlejohn, if you remember him) as the most boring place in the country and at the time I could quite believe him - there were no decent shops, no cinema or recreation facilities, no proper sports clubs and nowhere nice to eat. There were, however, plenty of pubs - If I walked to town, there was the Hutton Junction down by Shenfield station, up to the Eagle and Child and Green Dragon at Tabor's Corner, to the pubs of the high street - the Good Intent (now a Cafe Uno), White Horse (now a KFC), White Hart (now the Sugar Hut and a future post), Hobgoblin (now a Prezzo), Litten Tree (now called the Merchant), the Swan and the Charles Napier (now an access road). Round the back streets we also had the Gardiner's Arms and the Victoria Arms. A wealth of choice then, but although many a Saturday night was spent in the White Hart, my pub of choice was one I have not mentioned yet. It was opposite Sainsbury's, it had five pool tables and it had a landlord that would rather tell you to fuck off than serve you.
It was called The Castle.
The Castle used to be a biker pub but by the time I became a regular it had fallen into decline somewhat. I started drinking there because it was over the road from my work, and I have vague memories of going there before the pool tables came when they had a stage and regular live entertainment was held - I saw Al Murray play the pub landlord there before he became huge (was that 1998 or something?). When the pub began to go into decline they cleared the tables out of the large back area and replaced them with five pool tables, two on the old stage and three in the area in front of them. There were a couple of tables in the front of the pub by the windows and a beer "garden" out the back which was totally paved over and was where the ne'er do wells went to smoke weed. It was tatty, old and the toilets smelled horrible but it was mine. Mick - the landlord - was rude and swore at us all the time but we didn't care. The regulars were rough and ready and butted in on your pool games claiming winner stays on but we didn't care (much). The beer lines never seemed to be particularly clean but we didn't care. The jukebox hadn't been updated for ages but we didn't care. It was ours, a smoky cave which could have come right out of the 1980s just plonked on the side of one the main arteries through town. We didn't go there because it had nice beer, we went there for the atmosphere, the banter with the locals and the landlord, to have a good time and a game of pool, to get away from the realities of the world outside.
By 2005 we had moved on, now drinking mostly in Romford. Mick had gone, replaced by a long line of landlords who desperately tried to get the pub above its reputation, to stimulate business, to make a go of it. But they couldn't, and although I still visited fairly regularly the pub got emptier and emptier.
Then they took it away, in March 2007, on the same day they ran Freak (the rock night in Romford we had attended on-and-off since the late 90s) for the last time. On the last ever day of opening there were only a handful of people in the pub. I took an 8-ball from the back table, and at 10 we traipsed off having paid our respects and headed to Freak to pay our respects there as well, leaving behind only memories - many happy, drunken memories.
It's a club now, called Eclipse, and even that is failing. I've never been in there, and I don't really want to either, but every time I drive past it (and that's a lot) I think back, and have a smirk at something from an era I can genuinely call "the good old days"
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