Popination Proliferation
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: London Popinations PART THREE!
Popinations covered in today’s entry: The Cheshire Cheese (well, *a* Cheshire Cheese), the Hung Drawn & Quartered, Seething Lane Tap.
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Oh yes, there are so many more pubs to talk about! For such a short trip there were so many Popinations! (Of course there were—we were in London.) And this isn’t all, either; there are more. Oh yes, there will be more.
We had a quest to find, and indeed did find, the Cheshire Cheese, which we had heard about from the Tweedy Pubs guy who does interesting and otherwise historical pub crawls, except it turns out it wasn’t the one we were looking for. It was named the same as the historical one and happened to be very near our hotel. But it was fun anyway and we watched football in a real London pub whilst there, so.
Also close to our home base was a street called Seething Lane and I loved that name so much, I have kept a picture of what I call the Seething Skulls in my photo library and will keep it ever after. But it had a taphouse, too. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Cheshire? I hardly know her…
The Cheshire Cheese was probably our first slightly disappointing pub, at least the food I ordered was so for me. Even so, London continued to be such a novelty for me that I didn’t mind. There I was, watching football (not soccer, thankyouverymuch) at a real live pub. But someone needs to explain to me the Brits’ intense love of baked beans. It’s merely a barbecue side dish for me. Anyway. This pub was only our first stop for an early lunch since we slept in and were about to go trip our fairy feet around town for the rest of the day, so it was a good energy boost.
It’s an essay writing rule that you’re not supposed to move on to a new subheading after only one paragraph, but I honestly don’t have any more to say about the Cheshire Cheese. Except it’s a whimsically cool, very English name. Which is why we went to the wrong one—who knew there’d be more than one pub called the Cheshire Cheese? (Oh good. There’s two paragraphs. Moving on.)
Hanged Danged and Dimed
The Hung Drawn & Quartered (another wonderful name) had some cool historical decor, including some Tower-esque ravens, and I dug that vibe as we rested our feet after escaping the soccer hooligans who infested the Tube and the neighborhood surrounding the Sherlock Holmes Museum.
Yanno, it occurs to me that The HD&Q was set up that way because tourism. It’s okay, I was swayed. I’ll allow it. That’s also another thing I was unabashed about on this whole trip: the fact that I was an Anglophile American tourist on my virgin trip to London and was thoroughly and constantly delighted by all the things. Not even embarrassed about it. Allowed myself to fall in love with it. Might move there eventually, in which case I’ll be taking bets as far as how long it’d take me to become irritated with the touristy bits. My own hometown of Boulder, CO is a tourist attraction of a town, and growing up there amid its ridiculous beauty, I was pretty smug if not annoyed at agog tourists on a regular basis, maybe because they would get in my way as I tried to walk to the pub. But I dunno; I doubt that’d ever happen to me in London, but. Hey. You never know. You tell me, readers who live in London: do you ever get sick of any of it? Or bored? Or forget how cool it is?
Oooo I’m Seething!
Seething Lane: its skulls, its tap house. We’d normally walk down or past it each day as we embarked upon our daily exploratory journeys, and so came to be a little more familiar with that street (er, lane) than many more in our admittedly smallish sphere of London on this trip.* And so we knew we had to Popinate at some point to the Seething Lane Tap.
This one was a long and sort of brewery-cavernous space covered in little black and white tiles, some of which spelled out the name of the place on the surface under the bar. It was bright, plant-laden, and relaxing for all its brightness. As a severe contrast to the bright shiny tile and big windows with natural light spilling in, we sat on such worn out leather barstools that I wondered if they were a relic of historic pubs gone by. I had to share an image of them with my beloved bartender friends at my local, as the barstools there are sort of a running joke amongst us regulars, that they’re awful, broken, and some of them even almost unusable.
I have to Muse yet again about the odd (to me) fashion of ordering in London pubs—you go up and buy your pints one at a time and then go sit down. I started to get used to it, and even indeed to understand why it’s done this way sorta, by the end of my visit. Also the lack of tips on each tab was odd to me. I bet a Londoner coming to the U.S. would be flummoxed at our tipping and serving expectations at every bar.
*You guys, seriously: London is so big. And complicated. I’ll need at least five more trips before I even scratch the surface of all the cool stuff I want to see and do there. And that’s just London, not even including other things like the Royal Armouries in Leeds.
Conclusion Confusion
There is nothing sequential or chronological about this series of London Popinations, by the way. Have I mentioned that before? I’m including a handful of our pub experiences in each post, but I’m not going day by day or pub by pub in any organized manner. This week’s pub summary was a mix as usual, across days and experiences. But in this case we did have some echoes to our historical and artistic pursuits other than the pub ones.
More to come next week! Some upcoming pubs named after animals. No King’s Heads or Coach & Horses, surprisingly.
It’s funny: the best picture of a beer I snapped on my trip was the most disappointing beer I tasted on the trip. Ah well.