What makes a great English pub?
In an attempt to answer this we did a little online research and came across a famous essay written by George Orwell in 1946. George wrote about his favourite English pub, The Moon Under The Water, listing all of the reasons why this was a great English pub, before confessing that it didn’t actually exist.
Sadly, Mr Orwell is no longer about; were he to be, we think we have enough elements on his ‘perfect pub’ checklist to ensure he would happily visit the Salehurst Halt for a pint of ‘draught stout‘, and a ‘good, solid lunch‘. We have the pub garden he writes about, with entertainment for the ‘young customers‘ in the guise of a large table tennis, er, table; we have ‘no sham roof-beams’ or ‘plastic panels masquerading as oak’. And, perhaps most importantly, we have the barmaids (he phrased this in the feminine only – but you all know Dave right?) who know most of their customers by name.
George wrote that his ideal pub would ‘consist(s) mostly of ‘regulars’ who… go there for conversation as much as for the beer.’ Again, George, we can tick that box. We have our regulars who come at opening time; we have another set, some of whom overlap, who come in mid-afternoon; we have an evening crowd, a ‘pop-in-for-lunch’ crowd, a Sunday roast crowd. We have regulars who have been visiting the Halt for, quite literally, generations.
We don’t quite measure up to everything that George Orwell listed as his ideal requirements – he writes, ‘You cannot get dinner at the Moon Under Water, but there is always the snack counter where you can get liver-sausage sandwiches….’ Well George, you CAN get dinner at the Halt, but we don’t have liver-sausage sandwiches.
That sentence carries on though ‘…(and ) mussels (a specialty of the house), cheese, pickles and those large biscuits with caraway seeds in them which only seem to exist in public-houses.’ Moules mariniére are on the menu from time to time, and everyone who has tried them has raved about them. Do we have biscuits with caraway seeds in? If we don’t, and that is what you love, we’ll see if we can get some in.
He concludes his essay by writing, ‘… if anyone knows of a pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids, and no radio, I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms.‘
Is ‘The Salehurst Halt’ prosaic? Is a log-burning stove a match for an open fire? Are Fran and Claire ‘motherly’? We may not match the exacting standards of one England’s most celebrated writers, but we do think we have one of the best English pubs around, and pub that George Orwell would quite possibly approve of.