Ale fans drink to historic pubs

LONDON - From an eccentric village local that serves beer through a hatch in the cellar to elaborate city centre mahogany and mosaic parlours, Britain's finest historic pubs have been identified and celebrated by real ale enthusiasts.

The Campaign for Real Ale has compiled a list of the UK's "unspoilt" pubs - those that have been changed little in a century - in the hope of encouraging appreciative drinkers to preserve the architectural heritage of the nation's drinking establishments.

Under threat from property developers and the marketing departments of global breweries, the interiors of scores of historic British pubs are ripped out every year to make way for gastro pubs, bars or housing.

The campaign's "National Inventory", published yesterday in the new edition of the Good Beer Guide, lists 188 "unspoilt" pubs and a further 63 modernised pubs that have retained special features or rooms.

On the list are the Trip to Jerusalem, hewn into the rock under Nottingham Castle, and the Fleece in Bretforton, Worcestershire, whose warren of rooms has been painstakingly restored by the National Trust.

The Dyffryn Arms at Pontfaen in Pembrokeshire is one of the few remaining village inns to serve beer from a cellar hatch, while the extravagantly furnished Crown Liquor Saloon in Belfast is celebrated as "arguably the most sumptuous" pub in the country. Drinkers who enter its Corinthian columns are met by brocaded walls, carvings, ornate mirrors and painted glass with images of shells, pineapples, fairies and clowns and a ceiling of burnished yellow, red and gold.

The Victoria in Durham, the Garden Gate in Leeds and the Salisbury in Haringey, London, are among the other treasured mementos on the list.

Paul Ainsworth, chairman of the campaign's pub heritage group, said owners of historic pubs should appreciate their precious assets, asking: "If you have a genuine historic pub interior, what's the point of going to the trouble and expense of revamping it into one that's no different from thousands of others?"

Despite the threat to historic pubs, the guide said that real ale was thriving, with 84 new breweries opened in the past year - thanks in part to a cut in beer duty. Attendance at the campaign's Great British Beer Festival in London this year rose 40 per cent.

The editor of the Good Beer Guide, Roger Protz, said there had never been greater choice for real ale but he criticised global brewers for supplying "cold and tasteless" industrial nitro-keg bitters rather than traditional cask ale.

"The globals - Scottish & Newcastle, Coors, InBev and Carlsberg - have lost interest in the cask beer sector in order to make increased profits from processed beers," he said.

"In spite of the best efforts of the globals the future is bright for real ale. The craft brewers are not restricting themselves just to making bitter. Drinkers can now enjoy genuine mild, porter, stout, old ale, barley wine, harvest beer and winter ale."

- INDEPENDENT