Beer-aeth

Progress is a comfortable disease - E E Cummings The headline is that I wish this place didn't exist, yet I really like it and will definitely visit again. I was beginning to believe that my animosity to the core concept was actually my problem. It seemed I was wrong and needed to change with the times. This it turned out was a very brief mistake on my part and i now know that my instincts were completely, absolutely 100% correct, as always. Those momentary doubts are now long behind me and I have something else to blame, which is odd really considering that I'm writing this article about a bar which is perfectly nice. We Brought Beer is in Tooting Market, which is in many ways fantastic. It's got a record stall, a traditional sweet shop (in the same unit), places to eat, a butchers... But very little else that is actually recognisable as a market that I would be familiar with. I spent a lot of time in markets as a child, growing up between several market towns that my dad ...

I knew there was a pub around here somewhere. Bit of a maze these backstreets, well off the main roads. Should have been the first seeds of doubt perhaps, who's sustaining this place when it's so well hidden? I'd looked on Streetview so I knew it was there. It looked perfectly pleasant. Few wooden benches scattered out the front. No clear brewery/Pubco signs, no Sky Sports banners. Couldn't tell much else about it except what it wasn't; a Spoons or Greene King sticky tabled shithole, a Hungry Horse. So all positives. We approached from the side, so it only dawned on me slowly. The St George's flag was enormous. It was pretty much the same size as the entire fucking pub. It's true that my our visit coincided with England playing football in the women's Euros, but something told me that the two were unrelated.  Each corner of the cross contained an extra message, as if the ten by five metre England flag wasn't conveying it's meaning clearly enough....