LOCAL PUBS FOR LOCAL PEOPLE

I read in the SEBRA news that The Redan, on the corner of Queensway and Westbourne Grove, is threatened with closure. This is very bad news. Apart from anything else, it's a living connection with the Crimean War. The Redan was a celebrated feature of the battlefield of Sebastopol, and the storming of the Redan by Windham's Brigade on 8th September 1855 was one of the great British feats of arms of that shabby war, which was the first to gain modern media coverage and so created legends and celebrities in a very modern way. The trouble with a redan is that it's a military earthwork which is open at the back, so it's not actually defensible once you've stormed it; you need the whole enemy army to run away, otherwise they will just regroup and come back at you, which sadly is what happened to Windham's Brigade. Nevertheless, the Russians withdrew the next day, and the battle was won, so it became a great triumph, and it was certainly the scene of much bravery. The pub sign has a painting of the battle, and this was clearly the original name of the pub, from the time of its building, so it would be a shame to lose it.

The Marquess of Anglesey is a pub that has disappeared, but at least the building remains, because it has an important part in social history. It was on the corner of Ashmill Street and Daventry Street, between Edgware Road and Lisson Grove, and on my cycle route home from Bloomsbury or the City. This was the pub (it's now architects' offices) where the campaigning journalist W T Stead bought a thirteen-year-old girl for £5 in the summer of 1885. Stead was exposing child prostitution, and was sent to prison for three months for his pains, but the series of articles he wrote was instrumental in getting the age of consent raised from thirteen to fifteen. The girl was called Eliza Armstrong, and the pub was where her mother met Stead's accomplice, a reformed brothel-keeper, to effect the transaction. If you remember "My Fair Lady" (which is the musical of George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion", written in 1912) you may recall that Doolittle offers to sell his daughter Eliza to Henry Higgins, and that Higgins when he first meets Eliza identifies her accent as being from Lisson Grove: Shaw was one of Stead's closest supporters.

The Squirrel, across the junction from my office at St Peter's, is what used to be The Skiddaw (it was still that when we were first here) and never seems terribly busy. I hope it survives, because it is where the Victorian poet Francis Thompson used to spend his evenings when he lived in various sets of lodgings along Elgin Avenue and Goldney Road in the 1890s and 1900s. Thompson, who was a failed seminarian and morphine addict, used to sit in the corner by the fire to keep warm. He was kept afloat in his career as a poet by the wealthy Roman Catholic man of letters Wilfrid Meynell, who lived in Palace Court, off Bayswater Road, and it gave shape to Thompson's days to walk down there to see him.    

I don't think I ever saw The Yorkshire Stingo, but it was in the list of pubs in my "Nicholson's London Guide" which I was given as a child and continued to use through teenage and student visits to London. Mother and I never came that far north, because it was on the Marylebone Road, just at the angle where Old Marylebone Road turns south-west; and it was demolished in 1970 as part of the works for the Marylebone Flyover, which takes off at that point. The Yorkshire Stingo was the western terminus of Shillibeer's Omnibus, London's first scheduled bus service, in 1829; the bus is always described as going from Paddington to the Bank of England, but although the pub was on the edge of Paddington it was technically in St Marylebone, being the wrong side of Edgware Road, which is the historic boundary (being the Roman Watling Street). Not only that, but The Yorkshire Stingo also had a place in London's black history, as it was one of the places where the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor handed out relief to the unfortunate black loyalists who had fought for Britain in the American War of Independence (and who didn't qualify for relief under the Poor Law because they weren't born in an English parish). It seems that in 1786 it was somewhere that black Londoners met.  

The Waterway, my nearest pub, used to be The Paddington Stop, a landmark for canal boaters. It was totally rebuilt and given a new character shortly before we moved here, and I'm not sure you would call it a pub today. I have received a very grudging welcome when only wanting drinks, and they seem to employ some of the least well-informed bar staff you could imagine. Essentially it's an eating place, under the same management as the Summerhouse, further along Blomfield Road; you sometimes see kitchen staff wheeling trolleys from one to the other. It does staggeringly good business when the weather is pleasant.

The Elephant and Castle, on Elgin Avenue, just before the Harrow Road, has finally been redeveloped as flats, an enterprise that must have taken seven years. It was a nasty 1970s building that is little-mourned, but I imagine it perpetuated an older name, because that's not the sort of name breweries were giving new pubs at that time. The elephant and castle was the badge of the Royal African Company, one of the pioneers of the slave trade between West Africa and the West Indies. Lest we forget.