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Brewdog, Brexit And Broadbent
Jun. 25th, 2018 11:09 pmWe have spent the last three days in London, heading down after work on Thursday evening and returning last night. There were a number of reasons why we were in the capital: to head to all of the Brewdog bars (plus Brighton and Norwich), attend the People's Vote march on the second anniversary of the Brexit vote and go to the Royal Academy of Arts to see Tom Broadbent's photograph of Syrus and I having a barbecue in our front garden. Clearly we had a lot to fit in, particularly in such a short amount of time, but fortunately we were incredibly efficient and managed to do everything we wanted.
We were aided by the train being on time, meaning we got into King's Cross bang on 9pm. We had planned to cover three Brewdog bars on the Thursday evening - Camden, Soho and Shepherd's Bush - as I had planned a route based on the times these bars closed as well as proximity to the hotel. As it turned out, Seven Dials is on Shaftesbury Avenue not too far from Soho, so we managed to squeeze this in too. As we were doing our mini pub crawl, I had to deal with work related issues, and frustrated that this trip was looking like the debacle in Scotland where I ended up working close to eight hours, Wolfie took my phone off me and stopped me from receiving emails once I had resolved this more imminent problem. I must admit that I glad he did this, as the constant working had ground me down somewhat and I desperately needed a break. Being completely away from it all for 72 hours - for the first time in eight years if I was being honest - was something of a relief. I hadn't realised just how much of a positive effect it would have.
Anyway, we tried a third in each of the bars, with Seven Dials being the only one that was new to us. As we are currently in the business of just accumulating the stamps, the whistlestop nature of it didn't really matter, and thus we were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves as we headed over to Ealing where our hotel was based. This was a little out of the way for us, but the place was cheap and also new, which was its main draw. However, securing the hotel proved to be a pain on account of a fire which had taken place there during its construction on 18 April. The room was sold to me a week later, with the hotel website saying it was due for opening in May. However, there was a technical issue on the website that meant it erroneously booked for one person and not two, while a few weeks later we had to rearrange our plans and I needed an additional night. At that point, the hotel website was saying it wasn't opening until July and I couldn't make the additional night booking. Cue various emails to their customer service, along with over two hours of phone calls, with the booking department being unable to contact their own hotel. Some of them thought the hotel had opened on 11 June (which it had) and others went with the website and told me July, which was useless to me with a late-June booking. In the end, I had to get my brother, who lives in Ealing, to go down there and check on my behalf. It was all sorted but it was an absolute palava, and upon arrival I was fearing whether something would go wrong. Fortunately, everything went smoothly and we checked in and pretty much crashed straight afterwards as we had an early start in the morning.
We were slated to go to Norwich on the 09:35 service out of Liverpool Street, but we decided we would try and fit in Tower Hill Brewdog on the way, as it opened at 8am for breakfast serving. In the end, we just wanted the additional half hour of sleep, so after picking up a fairly meagre (albeit free) continental breakfast from the hotel, we boarded a Central Line train to Liverpool Street. As Ealing Broadway is a terminus stop, getting a seat wasn't too tricky and I must admit the morning commute wasn't as bad as I had feared, but towards the centre of London it did get somewhat uncomfortably packed and I doubt whether I could do this on a day-to-day basis. Anyway, we arrived at the station with significant time to spare, and mooched around aimlessly for a bit before getting our train. The journey up to Norwich was surprisingly lengthy and it was on a fast Intercity train rather than one of those TPE-style services I was expecting, but at least it was running on time as we didn't have long to spend there. The main plan was to tick the Brewdog bar off, but in the end we did have a few hours to kill, so we grabbed a Norfolk Pasty (basically a rebranded Cornish Pasty) from a local butcher and wandered around the pleasant narrow streets of the city. One thing you notice about Norwich is the number of small pretty stone churches, of different architecture to York but certainy of similiar volume. We also saw the Institute of Technology with a flayed man statue outside and had a pleasureable walk by the river in the summer sunshine. The Brewdog bar itself was quite empty when we arrived, but it did start to fill up, while the barlady was incredibly nice to talk to. All in all then, it was a good trip albeit an incredibly brief one.
The journey back to London was as uneventful as the journey from it, although the train was about fifteen minutes late getting into Liverpool Street. This was frustrating but didn't kybosh our plans too much, which were essentially to visit the other five Brewdog bars during the course of the afternoon. Brett had dropped me a message earlier in the day when we were in the Norwich bar, telling us that he and some friends were going to be at Brewdog Clapham from about 8-9pm, so we decided to plan our day around this, starting off at Tower Hill then moving on to Shoreditch, Clerkenwell and Angel before finishing in South London. As the weather was so good, we decided to walk to all of these, with Central London not being a particularly big place if you know it. The Brewdog in Tower Hill is immense, a huge expanse of a building and a real sign of how far they have come. Even at 4pm it was quite busy, and I really liked the atmosphere. One of their World Cup fanzones was at the bottom end of the bar while there were some brewing tanks in one corner, fermenting away. It was probably my favourite bar of them all, and I lamented that we could only really have one drink here. Alas, that was how it was as we had to fit all the others in. Indeed, as we traipsed around the streets of London, we saw a number of shops and bars we would like to visit - there was one on Brick Lane for example - but alas time was pressing and we needed to collect the stamps.
The staff in all of the bars were incredibly interested in what we were doing, with Shoreditch being surprisingly quiet for this time on a Friday night. Indeed, I had never seen it so quiet, but this did give us the opportunity to talk to the bar staff and nab their charger to boost our phone's battery. Friday was also the launch of their Overwatch range for the first time outside the brewery in Ellon but alas they would not let us get our paws on them until 6pm. It was at this time that we arrived in Clerkenwell though, so we did manage to drink halves of the two sours they had there before ticking off another one in Angel about an hour later. This was in the same bar which had closed down for a while - with their hot dog pop-up concept not quite working. It's now a regular bar and I am not quite sure it works in the area, or through the shape of it, but it did prove to be reasonably popular so my fears were perhaps unfounded. There was a nice Kiwi behind the bar who talked to us a while, and told us that someone had already got to forty bars before us, which is the ultimate prize. This is a little frustrating but we always suspected that someone would get there before we did so it was no real surprise.
We needed food and popped back onto Islington High Street to see what we could see. We ended up in a decent looking pub which served fantastic food - with the poutine being a particular delight. Granted there wasn't loads of gravy on it, but the flavour was such that there might as well be, and this complemented the creamy chicken and avocado burger really well. We also got to see a little bit of the World Cup, which we were sadly missing due to our trip, with a TV being situated very close to our table. It was a pleasurable pit stop after an afternoon of walking and set us up for the final bar of the night, Clapham.
We were running a little late here but so was Brett, and by the time we had gotten the tube from Angel to Clapham Common and then walked to the bar, it was touching 9:30pm. Fortunately, Brett and his friends had just arrived too, and we spent a great couple of hours chatting about various things. It'll be sad when Brett and his wife Jo (who wasn't in London this time) leave the UK to go back to Australia in February, so we'll have to try and see more of him around the Leeds area before he goes. We spent most of the time talking to Brett, but we also chatted to his friends, who we had met at their wedding a couple of years back. As the night wore on, the talk became increasingly deep, with me speaking to Brett's mates and Wolfie speaking with Brett himself. In the end, I was asked my opinion on abortion having talked about Brexit and my views on the death penalty for much of the second half of our stay in the bar. That was certainly not the expected destination of the conversation and in a way it was fortunate that shortly after this, we had to yomp to Clapham Junction train station to catch our last train. Indeed, upon arrival, we discovered there were no more trains to Shepherd's Bush and the Underground staff were largely clueless, only telling us that there were no more services. It was down to me to suggest we go to Waterloo and see what happens, to which the staff said 'now you're thinking' which indicated consent. Finding the platform for Waterloo was tricky but we eventually got there. I only had 3% battery on my phone while Wolfie was out, so looking anything up was somewhat dicey and I started to panic about having to get a taxi with no phone. In the end, I did discover that if we could get to Embankment by 00:36 we could get the final District Line train to Ealing Broadway, so the dash was on. We left Clapham Junction at 00:05, arrived at Waterloo at 00:20 then had to dart across the river to make it to the District Line. I felt pretty bad about this - partly because I had delayed us in getting to Clapham Junction due to going the wrong way and partly because I lamented my poor phone battery - so I was feeling pretty shit. After a few drinks, I get a little bitchy and Wolfie was seemingly doing his best to wind me up, which only made things worse. Anyway, we did manage to get to the platform at Embankment with three minutes to spare and thus we did get home. Alas, our relationship wasn't in a great shape and so we opted to stop at McDonald's to get a cheeseburger in an attempt to sober up slightly. We weren't drunk by any means, but it was clear we needed to stop the griping and this largely worked. However, there wasn't much time to make up as we had to head to bed pretty swiftly, with another early start ahead of us on Saturday.
We were aided by the train being on time, meaning we got into King's Cross bang on 9pm. We had planned to cover three Brewdog bars on the Thursday evening - Camden, Soho and Shepherd's Bush - as I had planned a route based on the times these bars closed as well as proximity to the hotel. As it turned out, Seven Dials is on Shaftesbury Avenue not too far from Soho, so we managed to squeeze this in too. As we were doing our mini pub crawl, I had to deal with work related issues, and frustrated that this trip was looking like the debacle in Scotland where I ended up working close to eight hours, Wolfie took my phone off me and stopped me from receiving emails once I had resolved this more imminent problem. I must admit that I glad he did this, as the constant working had ground me down somewhat and I desperately needed a break. Being completely away from it all for 72 hours - for the first time in eight years if I was being honest - was something of a relief. I hadn't realised just how much of a positive effect it would have.
Anyway, we tried a third in each of the bars, with Seven Dials being the only one that was new to us. As we are currently in the business of just accumulating the stamps, the whistlestop nature of it didn't really matter, and thus we were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves as we headed over to Ealing where our hotel was based. This was a little out of the way for us, but the place was cheap and also new, which was its main draw. However, securing the hotel proved to be a pain on account of a fire which had taken place there during its construction on 18 April. The room was sold to me a week later, with the hotel website saying it was due for opening in May. However, there was a technical issue on the website that meant it erroneously booked for one person and not two, while a few weeks later we had to rearrange our plans and I needed an additional night. At that point, the hotel website was saying it wasn't opening until July and I couldn't make the additional night booking. Cue various emails to their customer service, along with over two hours of phone calls, with the booking department being unable to contact their own hotel. Some of them thought the hotel had opened on 11 June (which it had) and others went with the website and told me July, which was useless to me with a late-June booking. In the end, I had to get my brother, who lives in Ealing, to go down there and check on my behalf. It was all sorted but it was an absolute palava, and upon arrival I was fearing whether something would go wrong. Fortunately, everything went smoothly and we checked in and pretty much crashed straight afterwards as we had an early start in the morning.
We were slated to go to Norwich on the 09:35 service out of Liverpool Street, but we decided we would try and fit in Tower Hill Brewdog on the way, as it opened at 8am for breakfast serving. In the end, we just wanted the additional half hour of sleep, so after picking up a fairly meagre (albeit free) continental breakfast from the hotel, we boarded a Central Line train to Liverpool Street. As Ealing Broadway is a terminus stop, getting a seat wasn't too tricky and I must admit the morning commute wasn't as bad as I had feared, but towards the centre of London it did get somewhat uncomfortably packed and I doubt whether I could do this on a day-to-day basis. Anyway, we arrived at the station with significant time to spare, and mooched around aimlessly for a bit before getting our train. The journey up to Norwich was surprisingly lengthy and it was on a fast Intercity train rather than one of those TPE-style services I was expecting, but at least it was running on time as we didn't have long to spend there. The main plan was to tick the Brewdog bar off, but in the end we did have a few hours to kill, so we grabbed a Norfolk Pasty (basically a rebranded Cornish Pasty) from a local butcher and wandered around the pleasant narrow streets of the city. One thing you notice about Norwich is the number of small pretty stone churches, of different architecture to York but certainy of similiar volume. We also saw the Institute of Technology with a flayed man statue outside and had a pleasureable walk by the river in the summer sunshine. The Brewdog bar itself was quite empty when we arrived, but it did start to fill up, while the barlady was incredibly nice to talk to. All in all then, it was a good trip albeit an incredibly brief one.
The journey back to London was as uneventful as the journey from it, although the train was about fifteen minutes late getting into Liverpool Street. This was frustrating but didn't kybosh our plans too much, which were essentially to visit the other five Brewdog bars during the course of the afternoon. Brett had dropped me a message earlier in the day when we were in the Norwich bar, telling us that he and some friends were going to be at Brewdog Clapham from about 8-9pm, so we decided to plan our day around this, starting off at Tower Hill then moving on to Shoreditch, Clerkenwell and Angel before finishing in South London. As the weather was so good, we decided to walk to all of these, with Central London not being a particularly big place if you know it. The Brewdog in Tower Hill is immense, a huge expanse of a building and a real sign of how far they have come. Even at 4pm it was quite busy, and I really liked the atmosphere. One of their World Cup fanzones was at the bottom end of the bar while there were some brewing tanks in one corner, fermenting away. It was probably my favourite bar of them all, and I lamented that we could only really have one drink here. Alas, that was how it was as we had to fit all the others in. Indeed, as we traipsed around the streets of London, we saw a number of shops and bars we would like to visit - there was one on Brick Lane for example - but alas time was pressing and we needed to collect the stamps.
The staff in all of the bars were incredibly interested in what we were doing, with Shoreditch being surprisingly quiet for this time on a Friday night. Indeed, I had never seen it so quiet, but this did give us the opportunity to talk to the bar staff and nab their charger to boost our phone's battery. Friday was also the launch of their Overwatch range for the first time outside the brewery in Ellon but alas they would not let us get our paws on them until 6pm. It was at this time that we arrived in Clerkenwell though, so we did manage to drink halves of the two sours they had there before ticking off another one in Angel about an hour later. This was in the same bar which had closed down for a while - with their hot dog pop-up concept not quite working. It's now a regular bar and I am not quite sure it works in the area, or through the shape of it, but it did prove to be reasonably popular so my fears were perhaps unfounded. There was a nice Kiwi behind the bar who talked to us a while, and told us that someone had already got to forty bars before us, which is the ultimate prize. This is a little frustrating but we always suspected that someone would get there before we did so it was no real surprise.
We needed food and popped back onto Islington High Street to see what we could see. We ended up in a decent looking pub which served fantastic food - with the poutine being a particular delight. Granted there wasn't loads of gravy on it, but the flavour was such that there might as well be, and this complemented the creamy chicken and avocado burger really well. We also got to see a little bit of the World Cup, which we were sadly missing due to our trip, with a TV being situated very close to our table. It was a pleasurable pit stop after an afternoon of walking and set us up for the final bar of the night, Clapham.
We were running a little late here but so was Brett, and by the time we had gotten the tube from Angel to Clapham Common and then walked to the bar, it was touching 9:30pm. Fortunately, Brett and his friends had just arrived too, and we spent a great couple of hours chatting about various things. It'll be sad when Brett and his wife Jo (who wasn't in London this time) leave the UK to go back to Australia in February, so we'll have to try and see more of him around the Leeds area before he goes. We spent most of the time talking to Brett, but we also chatted to his friends, who we had met at their wedding a couple of years back. As the night wore on, the talk became increasingly deep, with me speaking to Brett's mates and Wolfie speaking with Brett himself. In the end, I was asked my opinion on abortion having talked about Brexit and my views on the death penalty for much of the second half of our stay in the bar. That was certainly not the expected destination of the conversation and in a way it was fortunate that shortly after this, we had to yomp to Clapham Junction train station to catch our last train. Indeed, upon arrival, we discovered there were no more trains to Shepherd's Bush and the Underground staff were largely clueless, only telling us that there were no more services. It was down to me to suggest we go to Waterloo and see what happens, to which the staff said 'now you're thinking' which indicated consent. Finding the platform for Waterloo was tricky but we eventually got there. I only had 3% battery on my phone while Wolfie was out, so looking anything up was somewhat dicey and I started to panic about having to get a taxi with no phone. In the end, I did discover that if we could get to Embankment by 00:36 we could get the final District Line train to Ealing Broadway, so the dash was on. We left Clapham Junction at 00:05, arrived at Waterloo at 00:20 then had to dart across the river to make it to the District Line. I felt pretty bad about this - partly because I had delayed us in getting to Clapham Junction due to going the wrong way and partly because I lamented my poor phone battery - so I was feeling pretty shit. After a few drinks, I get a little bitchy and Wolfie was seemingly doing his best to wind me up, which only made things worse. Anyway, we did manage to get to the platform at Embankment with three minutes to spare and thus we did get home. Alas, our relationship wasn't in a great shape and so we opted to stop at McDonald's to get a cheeseburger in an attempt to sober up slightly. We weren't drunk by any means, but it was clear we needed to stop the griping and this largely worked. However, there wasn't much time to make up as we had to head to bed pretty swiftly, with another early start ahead of us on Saturday.
