Plenty of 'craft beer bars' *eurgh...* have opened in vacant retail units or gentrified market halls. I'm sure that I'll write about many more, good and bad. I'm not sure however, many have opened in derelict Victorian lean-tos on inauspicious gyratories of provincial Welsh market towns which are the polar opposite of gentrified. I would guess few.
Being somewhat au fait with the locale, I am sure the building in question has been out of use for at least thirty years, and was probably in its heyday at roughly the same time that the canal was. I assume that the name wasn't plucked out of the ether, and that this was indeed a bakery in the olden times, but for everybody in Pool barring the most ancient it has always been a boarded up red brick abutment which has drawn the eye of absolutely nobody.
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| How it used to look |
Drinks in Welshpool will revolve around your chosen local. They're all much of a muchness, the only really discernable difference being the clientele rather than the features of the establishment (Welshpool is not unique in this respect). If you were to walk into The Talbot and The Welly whilst empty, they could feasibly be different rooms of the same pub. When full, you probably wouldn't walk into The Welly. To be honest, you probably wouldn't walk into The Talbot either, but that's beside the point. There are objectively no superior pubs. They are all, almost, equally shit. But, you've got your own shit pub, and with no word of a lie, I don't mind that.
Saturday night is an exception. Everyone starts at the top of town, and works their way down. They begin to coalesce around The Unpleasant Pheasant, and absolutely everybody goes to The Angel. Which is a shithole. But usually serves a good pint of Three Tuns, so make of that what you will. The final destination is the archetype for the dreadful, depressing provincial nightclub - Grimages.
This is how it has always been. It is how it always shall be. But with fewer pubs, having already lost The Mermaid, The Crown, The Pinewood, Churchills, maybe more. But somebody said "No! There is space for something else!"
Unfortunately, someone said that what was needed was reopening Churchills as a champagne bar with a VIP cocktail bar upstairs, a destination venue attracting clients from across the Midlands of England. This one never seems to have got off the ground, perhaps the delusional individual behind this utterly batshit project took a quick look at a train timetable, or maybe just came to the only possible conclusion that the entire scheme was mad as badger piss in every respect. We shall never know.
Fortunately, The Old Bakehouse opened. It's not big, which is in common with these new style pubs, and it's hardly a bad thing anyway. I mean, who can afford to be running an enormous shell of a coaching tavern in this economy? The building is narrow, with seating on benches along the outer walls and split over two floors. Access to the upper floor is via a spiral staircase to which I can attest, requires session ale only. The decor suffers from the same issues that plague many new pubs. Everything just looks, feels, and smells too new. Time will work wonders of course, though the aging process of pub's internal walls has been slowed since the smoking ban. To mitigate this, The Old Bakehouse has done something that doesn't seem to occur to the vast majority of these places - it's decorated with depictions of its ties to the past. An alleyway close to the pub was formerly the route of the Welshpool and Llanfair Light Railway, and there are many photos of the goods trains reversing through the gap between the buildings and across the road beneath the church.
Sadly this arrangement was brought to an end in the fifties or sixties, and the restored volunteer run railway now terminates at the top end of town. Any chance of re-establishing the historic route was quashed when a massive fucking Tesco was built across the old trackbed in about 2010, because back then who could have foreseen that routing a tourist railway through the centre of a Welsh town to join with a national rail station could attract a significant number of tourists to the benefit of the local community? Nobody. Except some other Welsh town councils.
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| The former route of the railway. The buildings on the right have been demolished and The Old Bakehouse would be a short way up the alley on the left. |
The bar is at the end of the room, and this allowed me to assess the clientele as I passed through. It looked like most had been displaced from The Royal Oak, but there was a smattering of younger lads upstairs. Most seats were full, but it didn't have the feeling of being busy. It's not a surprise though given the date of my visit. Not being an affluent area, Welshpool nightlife is heavily dependent on the length of time until payday.
I approach the bar. Four cask ales. Station Bitter, and Wrangler from Stonehouse, a Salopian, and Titanic Plum Porter. Four kegged beers, which I don't pay too much attention to, but included a Polly's, de rigueur. Despite there being some excellent cidermakers in the vicinity there was a dearth of decent cider, only a couple of Retchkordling-alikes.
It has been a while since I'd had a pint of TPP, a perennial favourite, and I'd had all the other cask offerings at one time or another. I made the correct choice. The condition was outstanding. Good enough to have four of them in fact.
After first taking a seat upstairs I decided to move down to the slightly busier ground floor to soak up a bit of the ambience, by which I mean eavesdropping on conversations with the express intention of writing about them later. I made the right choice. I was treated to a superb nugget of utter bollocks, a besuited man in his sixties complaining that he'd been to see the latest Michael Caine film and "it was a load of left wing, feminist nonsense." Which no doubt would have come as a huge shock and disappointment to renowned Tory donor Michael Caine. Maybe he'll donate his fee as recompense?
Welshpool needs a place like this. There is nowhere else in the town you could describe as beer forward. Every other pub seems to treat beer as something that it has to have. "People want to come here, for some mad fucking reason, I suppose we'd best put some beer on" seems to be the prevailing attitude, without any consideration for what the beer should be. It sometimes seems that there's more consideration of what's on the telly than what's on the pump. If this was a wise philosophy, then why is it that every pub in th country has one thing displayed on the bar, giving it pre-eminence amongst all other products in the hostelry - beer. I am yet to visit a pub that puts it's wine offering on the front of the bar and tucks a few half empty bottles of ale away on a shelf at the back with all the bar staff wondering when each was opened....
On the opening weekend of The Old Bakehouse they spent most of it calling up breweries asking what they could deliver ASAFP, because they'd completely sold out. There is hardly a better omen. It may only be one weekend, but the appetite is there. It's not like it's the sort of place that people can only afford to visit once a year. Like a Mid-Walian champagne and cocktail bar.
Finding a taxi was a real struggle. The bar staff were helpful though, providing numbers of those that were likely to be working on a Friday night. Not that I needed a taxi at all. Arrangements could have been made for my collection quite easily several hours prior, but would have caused me to miss out on a visit to The Old Bakehouse. Upon supping my first pint of TPP and calculating how many more I could reasonably have, I knew I'd made the right choice.
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