Book Review: Happy Hours - A Great British Pub Diary.
It was none other than George Orwell who outlined the essentials that every pub should possess in his famous 1946 essay The Moon Under Water.
As well as Victorian architecture, liver sausage sandwiches and “creamy draught stout”, Orwell also mentioned that crucial ingredient: a welcoming atmosphere.
Eighty years later, journalist Mike Critchley has followed in Orwell's footsteps. But where the creator of Room 101, Newspeak and Big Brother simply built a composite of his favourite London pubs to create his fictional favourite, Critchley has taken a far greater sample to paint a picture of the character-packed pubs of the British Isles in what is nothing less than a call to arms to protect this most essential aspect of our society.
Since 1984, when he turned 18, Critchley has noted down every pub he has visited in a little blue notebook, chronicling more than 1,900 hostelries in all their ale-soaked glory and providing us with an alternative social history that documents all the changes, both good and bad, that life in this country has undergone.
Critichley's early days drinking in his hometown of St Helens are full of vivid images: cigarettes dispensed from machines “with the change Sellotaped to the packets”; “a shaky chap with an empty bottle asking for the contents of the slops tray” and the town's “famous ale-swiller Joe Johnson who once drank 100 pints of bitter in one hour and 42 minutes”.
By the 1990s Critchley was in Birmingham, drinking in the Irish pubs of Digbeth. In Ladywood his eyes were drawn with a grim fascination to “a clearly visible pick-axe stashed behind the bar” of The Bricklayers and contemplated its deterrent effect.
It's this journalist's eye for detail which makes this book such a delight - legendary landlords and landladies are legion while Critchley takes an enthusiastic care in detailing the fixtures and fittings of every pub he enters.
Naturally one is drawn towards pubs you might have known and loved and I delighted in reading some of the descriptions of Liverpool's great pubs and some of my own favourites.
Critchley enjoys a “three pinter” in Waterloo's Volunteer Canteen where table service was a (pre-Covid) rarity, while he recalls the hopelessness of Thatcher's Britain when drinking in the Baltic Fleet as he remembers its appearance in Boys From The Blackstuff.
There's poignancy too in Critchley's descriptions of Covid hitting the UK and the detailing of its human cost and on pubs themselves.
Coming soon after the loss of his father, the ending of the “camaraderie and mixing with likeminded folk that going to the local provides” only increases the grief.
This is an exceptional book; like the best pub crawl it is full of highs and lows but as a hangover cure it's right up there with a bacon butty.
Happy Hours – A Great British Pub Diary, by Mike Critchley is published by Scratching Shed and is on sale at Waterstones.com and Amazon priced £14.99.
*The book's 175 pubs featured include mini chapters on The Bobbin in Leigh, Ye Old Man and Scythe in Bolton, The Griffin, Swan and Railway and Moon under Water in Wigan and several in St Helens and Manchester.
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