April: Kicking Off in Old Street, A Smaller Brew and Easter in SE12/13

A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by Will Hawkes

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Kick Off

Two untidy piles of football scarves sit by the door at The Volley, London’s soon-to-be new football pub. One is a mishmash of colours representing different clubs and nations - Scotland, Rapid Vienna, a silky 1980s Roma effort - and the other is almost entirely green and white, the colours of Celtic FC. 

Mark Hislop, co-founder and Rangers supporter, points to the second pile. “Do you know anybody who might want these?” he says with mock exasperation. “I’m not putting all of them up on the wall.” He pauses. “I’ll put one up.”

You can’t say fairer than that - and for London’s football fans, drawn from a hundred different traditions, The Volley might prove an equally equitable proposal. With 13 screens (two of them huge projector efforts) and a commitment to good beer, it’s a (perhaps surprisingly) new concept for the capital - only Feed The Yak, Elephant and Castle’s impressive little bar/bottle shop comes close, but it’s not on the same scale.

Then again, football and decent beer have a complicated history here. It’s not hard to find a good pint near the grounds of London’s 13 professional clubs, but inside it’s often a different proposition. Tottenham, of course, has a Beavertown brewery inside whatever it is they call White Hart Lane now, and elsewhere things have improved a little, but not much. Beer at a London match generally means expensive pints of big-brand lager.

It’s odd, since there is a huge amount of crossover between good beer and football of all kinds. The Volley, according to Mark, will bridge the divide. The house beers (including Oranje, a hazy IPA) will be made by contract brewer Match Day Brewery, whose director, Charlie Hood, is part of The Volley team. These beers will include a collaboration with Deja. The rest of the line-up will be made up of beers from “our favourite London breweries”, says Mark - including The Kernel, Pretty Decent, and Hackney for starters - and something German, possibly Ayinger.

That’s not all. The Volley will also be home to one of London’s vanishingly few Tennents taps, alongside The Scottish Stores in King’s Cross and the nearby Wenlock Arms. “I think this will be the only place in London where you’ll be able to drink Tennents and watch Scottish football, which is the holy grail,” says Mark with a chuckle.

Not just Scottish football, though. The beauty of London is that there are supporters of virtually every club on the planet here, Mark says. “We’ve been speaking to the Inter Milan supporters club, and they seem like nice guys - we’re going to try and host them for a few games,” he says. “We’re going to try and do the same for German football, too.” Men’s and women’s football will be shown, he says.

Reading between the lines, it appears the concept was born out of frustration. “I’m a Rangers fan, and [co-founder Tom Boulton] is a Stoke fan, and the number of times one of our teams has been playing but there’s a big [Premier League] game on, there’s no chance of seeing it,” Mark (below left) says. “We’re going to make sure we’ve always got a screen showing the wee guys.”

This is not Mark’s first attempt to shake up London’s beer market. Having begun his career at Blackfriars pub in Glasgow, he was one of a four-person team that set up Five Miles, a nightclub and brewery in Tottenham. That evolved, after a fashion, into Hale Brewery, which became Exale a while later. Mark was working there until recently. 

The Volley is housed on a site (in The Bower, a large mixed development which opened in 2015) with a strong recent beer tradition: it was originally Draft House Old Street before evolving into a Brewdog bar - for a (very short) while, indeed, it was their much-touted alcohol-free bar. The Volley is subletting from Brewdog, who, Mark says, got in touch because they were keen to help smaller companies that might not be able to afford the rent at places like these. “That was pretty nice of them,” he says.

One of the site’s advantages is its proximity to a number of excellent craft-beer-focused pubs: the Old Fountain at the end of the road, The Wenlock, The Griffin in Shoreditch and, slightly further afield, Clerkenwell’s mighty Sutton Arms. A great crawl, particularly if you like football.

Food will come from Twisted, a food brand with a huge instagram following, who’ll initially be providing burgers while a football-themed sandwich menu is developed - ‘Sandwich Goals’, with different chefs producing sandwiches inspired by famous stadiums and teams. Decoration is iconic football images, carpet on a section in front of one of the big screens - for that authentic pub feel, and all those scarves, including (see if you can spot it) one from Celtic. Kick off is fast approaching. 

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Midnight Flit

A depressingly familiar story from The Ravensbourne Arms, a closed pub in Lewisham. The owners - Ravensbourne Arms Ltd -  have announced plans to turn it into four flats, claiming that “no offer has been made for the site in the last seven years” and that the pub is unviable. In fact, a group called Sister Midnight (which is working to open a community-owned music venue in the borough) very publicly campaigned to buy the pub in 2022, and were told at the time that a better offer had been received. 

As someone who used to drink in the pub when it was run by Antic, my view is that it is viable, particularly if run by a group with the sort of energy shown by Sister Midnight. It would be a real shame to lose it.

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Small Beer

The return of Brew//LDN later this month is interesting for two reasons. It’ll take place on a smaller scale than before, having swapped South London’s massive Printworks for Between The Bridges, a site on the Southbank. That makes sense, because the event struggled to fill Printworks last year. It also looks like the previous owners of Brew//LDN, Chris Bayliss and Daniel Rowntree (who were also behind Craft Beer Rising), have handed over control to Peppermint, which runs Between The Bridges. That’s not clear from the website; when I asked Bayliss about it recently on linkedin, he said that he was “still involved, helping them have a seamless transition.”

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Tribal Parting

Justin Deighton has left Two Tribes, the brewery he co-founded in 2017. Two Tribes is one of the big success stories of London brewing’s second wave, producing a huge amount of beer for a wide variety of outlets. 

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Smart Set

It’s been a big few months for animals in South London pubs. First Frances Bacon, the pig that lived at The Conquering Hero in Upper Norwood, died; now a pub called The Red Setter has been opened in Battersea, with red setters at the launch event. 

Meanwhile, the London Beer Dispensary in Crofton Park has reopened after a spruce-up; as has The Union Tavern in Westbourne Park, including new covering for the outdoor area abutting the canal. 

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Two Pubs, One City

Dacre Arms, SE13, and Duke of Edinburgh, SE12

Inside the Dacre Arms it’s bedlam, albeit of a congenial sort. There’s loud music - Lover’s Rock and soul, Silly Games and This Old Heart of Mine - courtesy of DJ Deano, whose decks, a complex tangle of wires and tables, are facing the front door. At the bar there’s a football team, Dacre Arms on their shirts, drinking shots and talking loudly. On the big telly at the back, Arsenal are playing Manchester City in a crucial title crunch contest. Every seat is taken - more or less - and people are gleeful, smiling and cracking jokes, singing along, Demob-happy.

It’s just before 6pm on Easter Sunday and tomorrow is a day off. If you’re going to go to the pub, today’s the day. All the fun with none of the repercussions, or at least none of the serious ones. It’s no wonder that at this moment The Dacre Arms, a handsome back-street boozer of the old school, feels like an idealised version of the pub.

I squeeze through the crowd at the bar and get a pint of Proper Job (£6). It’s superb. From the bar, I spot a seat in front of the decks, where an older couple is sitting. With a mixture of sign language and pointing, I establish that the seat across from them is free, and I sit down.

It’s loud so I can’t really chat to them, though. There’s plenty to look at: Toby Jugs, a deep red, richly decorated carpet, a sign over the fireplace declaring The Dacre Arms to be ‘cask ale specialists’. Deano brings the couple a round of drinks, before a signal from the bar leads to thirty seconds of Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’, with the football team singing along. 

A younger woman comes in and greets the older couple, and I take it as my sign to go. The woman insists I can stay - but my pint is finished and, anyway, it’s too loud in here to do anything but grin gormlessly. It's a moment suited to groups of pals rather than lone nerds escaping for a pint after Sunday Lunch.

10 minutes’ walk from The Dacre Arms brings you to the Duke of Edinburgh, another good-looking pub. This is Lee, a neighbourhood south of Lewisham once known for pubs, but most are shut now. Nearby, the Old Tiger’s Head clings on (although, as that CAMRA page wryly notes, it is “often found in dark well into the evening”) while the New Tiger’s Head - an extremely handsome structure - is now a food shop. The saddest site is probably the former Woodman, which still has marvellous detail at the top and along the side of the facade.

Inside the Duke of Edinburgh, happily, it’s busy. Everyone is watching two big screens where the final moments of Sunday’s massive (but rather dull) match are playing out. Like The Dacre, this is a community pub: a coat stand near the door heaves under the weight of outerwear, and there are bags with Twirl Easter Eggs - presumably bought for delivery later - stashed at the bottom. 

There’s no cask ale - the pumps are in beautiful shape, but not in operation - so I go for Guinness (£4.50; this beer is either £4.50 or about £7 in this city. Nothing in between) and find a seat. I’m close to a group of nervous young Arsenal fans (‘We’ll take the point bro,” one says to the others as Arsenal see the game out at 0-0), who all leave as the final whistle blows. A small dog decides this is the perfect time to start woofing.

I take one of the seats vacated at the bar. The landlord - I’m presuming it's the landlord - is a tidy, busy man and he keeps a tidy pub. Compared to the Dacre, it’s a bit short of decoration and lushness - no booths here - but there’s bits and bobs, including Six Nations-related flags hanging from the ceiling in the small, tablet-shaped bar.

It’s just regulars now, joshing about a night out (“I thought we might have Morley’s”, one suggests). It’s a nice atmosphere in which to finish off my beer, calm and easy-going and, in its own way, just as enjoyable as bedlam at the Dacre. 

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading!