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Pub Review: Greenwich Union

April 17, 2009 By Rosie Dow

The Greenwich Union
56 Royal Hill, SE10 8RT
£3.50-£4.20 / pint.

It's Ale About The Beer

If real ale is your thing then The Greenwich Union is a real treat.

The Union is the flag-pub of local beer academic Alastair Hook and his Meantime Brewing Company. Hook’s mission is clear: to give publicans more choice of real ales by local brewers and I’d say on that score The Union is a resounding success.

The beer is the real star of the show and definitely gives The Union an edge. The selection of Meantime ales is extensive, from wheat and raspberry beers on draught to unusual bottled beers such as chocolate and coffee. Be warned that anything mainstream is against Meantime’s religion so the wine and soft drink selection is merely adequate and don’t expect Carlsberg or cider on tap. But then again, ordering a Carlsberg here would be a bit like asking for a pot noodle at a gourmet Chinese restaurant, so I wouldn’t necessarily call its absence a failing.

From the outside the pub has an inviting glow and has both back and front beer gardens. The clientele are mostly professionals of all ages and with its ale focus its not one for the kids (so all the nicer for those without them!). The staff are friendly and service was quick but I did go midweek and The Union’s very small bar might make getting a pint in at the weekend a tad more difficult.

There is simple Gastro Pub grub on offer, so steaks, fish, lashings of chips and hearty puddings, boasting locally sourced produce at reasonable prices. However it’s not great for Vegetarian diners with only 1 or 2 suitable dishes.

What they say: "Our sole concern is to put before the consumer the most exciting flavours to be found in beer that we are able to create with the wit and technology at our disposal" – Meantime Website

What you say: “Brilliant Beer! The friendly staff said hello when I came in and recommended a beer to me as I wasn’t sure what to choose. I’d definitely come here again” – Fellow Customer

What do you think about the Greenwich Union pub? Post your comments below...

Filed Under: Magazine Tagged With: Greenwich Union, Pub Review, Royal Hill

Andrew Gilligan: No-Go Area

February 18, 2009 By Andrew Gilligan

At the bottom of my road, where it meets Royal Hill, there is every few seconds a sad little tableau. An impatient car (how can a car look impatient, you ask? But it does) drives up to the junction from the London direction. The driver slows to turn into my street, then notices the big notice saying "Road closed - No access to Shooters Hill," whereupon he speeds up again and heads for the permanant traffic jam that is now central Greenwich.

At the top of my road, where it meets the A2, there is an even more poignant sight: a constant parade of U-turning drivers who have ignored the sign at the bottom of the road (there's so little trust in government these days, isn't there?) and driven all the way up, bashing the road humps in their haste, only to find that the warning is in fact correct, and their path is blocked by a high fence and an orange wall of traffic cones. Like that BBC reporter in the Falklands, I sit in my study window, counting them all out, then counting them all back.

For forty-eight hours now, pretty much every side street in West Greenwich has been filled with probing, questing motor vehicles, desperately trying to find an eastbound route without a 45-minute queue - and failing every time. The main roads are just filled. During this evening's rush-hour, traffic was completely solid on Greenwich High Road, with something like 250 crawling cars between the Deptford Broadway lights and St Alfege's church. Much of Blackheath village, too, is at a standstill. The old buildings of both places shudder beneath a constant parade of heavy lorries. Horns and emergency service sirens wail into the night.

The cause, as we probably all know by now, is that TfL have closed the eastbound A2 between the bottom of Blackheath Hill (at the junction with Greenwich South Street) and Charlton Way/ Shooters Hill Road. For the next two months. To install a cycle lane.

I happened to be up very early on Sunday morning, when the closure first went into effect. From 5.30am on the quietest day of the week, there was a procession of dozens of cars down my street as the first stage of the diversions kicked in. That was when I knew that this was going to be bad.

Even most foot access has been blocked by the fence - there's only one pedestrian gap in it between the tea hut and Dartmouth Hill. West Greenwich has been cut off from Blackheath by land, air and sea.

Now, I'm a cyclist - I've never driven or owned a car in my life - and I've spent years asking for more cycle lanes. But I really don't think that essentially pouring a giant vat of glue over the whole of Greenwich and Blackheath for the next eight weeks is a price worth paying for this one.

For one thing, there are already three parallel, and far nicer, cycle routes to the A2 - along Dartmouth Hill, Hare and Billet Road, Mounts Pond Road and Long Pond Road; up through the park to Vanbrugh Park; and along the river and through the grounds of the naval college. That last one doesn't even involve a hill.

Even the justification in TfL's own press release is rather carefully worded: "This stretch of the A2 runs through Blackheath, an area that attracts many cyclists and pedestrians," they say. The "area," yes. The A2, not so much.

The other reason for the closure is so that TfL can "reconstruct the carriageway" and install new streetlights. But what exactly is wrong with the current streetlights? What does reconstruction mean - does it mean resurfacing? What was wrong with the previous surface? Why does it all have to take two months? (Why, for instance, aren't they working at night on the stretch across the heath, since there are no residents to disturb?) And let us not forget that the Blackheath Hill stretch of the road was subject to "reconstruction" only five years ago following the Blackheath Hole collapse.

The cynic in me does wonder whether this is another part of "Transport for Livingstone's" historic jihad against motorists. Perhaps closing down this main arterial route is another way of showing those despised creatures (many of whom, to compound their offence, are white, heterosexual men from the suburbs) the error of their ways.

The other historic Transport for Livingstone impulse that this closure clearly satisfies is the need to spend large amounts of money on projects which don't seem of obvious or front-rank importance.

You may, of course, object that Ken is no longer in charge. But this was presumably planned when he still was; and in any case, for the most part, under the new regime, TfL has gone on pretty much as before. Recently, I described to an appreciative senior City Hall figure some of the more bonkers ways in which TfL has been wasting money, ways that need to be mended rather more urgently than the A2 if the organisation is to survive the downturn with its services intact.

For the next eight weeks, though, we appear to be stuck with this. Let's hope it is just eight weeks, shall we? Let's hope the works don't overrun; let's hope, above all, that they don't open up the Blackheath Hill hole again and let us in for another two years of local traffic hell. They're bound to have thought of that, aren't they? Aren't they?

Filed Under: Andrew Gilligan Tagged With: A2, Hyde Vale, Royal Hill, Shooters Hill, TFL

Last Orders

December 23, 2008 By Andrew Gilligan

The Greenwich Union and The Richard I pubs

THEY’VE just tarted up the Richard I, in Royal Hill, and I don’t like it. It’s not a disaster. They haven’t destroyed the place. But almost everything they have done is slightly wrong, and is clearly the work of people without any real feeling for a traditional pub.

The old-fashioned light fittings inside the main front windows have been replaced with large, bulbous globes of the kind you see in shopping-centre coffee chains. More of these things appear above both bars.

The saloon bar has been carpeted, in a carpet that would be attractive in a modern restaurant, but is not right here. The floor in the public bar, and all other wooden surfaces, have been varnished to within an inch of their lives. The yellowing old walls have been blandly repainted. Standard-issue café-bar type furniture has joined the pub tables and chairs. In a pub once known for its resistance to canned music, canned music now plays. An “Abba themed 60s and 70s party” is promised.

I know pubs are having an even worse time than the rest of us at the moment. Like small shops and post offices, they’re one of those bedrocks of England that increasingly aren’t there any more; even before the recession, it was reported that five a day were closing.

The Richard I is clearly trying to move away from the problematic pub category, into the territory of the café-bar. But it risks being an unhappy compromise, sacrificing the distinctive for the generic.

The fact is that pure-breed, slightly scruffy traditional pubs, of the kind the Richard I now half-isn’t, are now rarer and more interesting than café-bars. Many have either closed, or been converted to a small number of distinctly tired formulae.

There’s the youth drinking warehouse. The High Street chain pub, with its Sky Sports, predictable décor and accessories (job-lots of second-hand books on a shelf high up the wall, you know the sort of thing.) And the gastro-pub, where it’s the menu that’s often predictable (venison sausages and mash, sticky toffee pudding.)

The curse of the pub trade is partly the smoking ban, changing drinking habits and social patterns – the smoking ban, in particular, has done great damage and there is further New Labour nannying, such as price controls and happy-hour bans, to come. But perhaps the biggest problem is the rise, over the last twenty years, in pub corporate ownership.

Pubs used to be owned mainly by breweries, but in the early 1990s this was restricted. They are now owned mainly by a handful of giant pubcos, effectively property companies which brew no beer. Publicans allege that the pubcos, which are mostly heavily indebted, try to squeeze too much from their assets. And what’s undeniable is that, like the chaining of shops, the chaining of pubs has led to a loss of imagination and variety.

The Richard I may be one of the roughly 10,000 British pubs still owned by a brewery, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped it being affected by the trends in the rest of the sector. There’s a need for real action to save our pubs, unless we want another national institution to be destroyed.

Greenwich was, and indeed still is, a bit of a pub island: in a London of closed-down and tarted-up hostelries, relatively few of our pubs have shut or become formulaic. Let’s hope I’m overreacting to the Richard I; let’s hope it doesn’t herald further local disappearances of originality and character.

Filed Under: Andrew Gilligan Tagged With: Pubs, Richard I, Royal Hill

Daily Photo 24/11/08: The Cheeseboard

November 24, 2008 By Rob Powell

The Cheeseboard in Royal Hill

Filed Under: Magazine Tagged With: Daily Photo, Royal Hill

Daily Photo 21/11/08: Royal Hill School

November 21, 2008 By Rob Powell

Royal Hill School

The Victorian school on Royal Hill in the background.

Filed Under: Magazine Tagged With: Daily Photo, Royal Hill

Daily Photo 31/10/08: Pumpkins Galore!

October 31, 2008 By Rob Powell

The Creaky Shed

I was passing the Creaky Shed on Royal Hill the other week and saw these piles of pumpkins and thought this would make a great Daily Photo for Halloween.

Filed Under: Magazine Tagged With: Daily Photo, Royal Hill

Daily Photo 20/10/08: Weekend’s Over

October 20, 2008 By Rob Powell

School Entrance
It's Monday morning which always reminds me of going back to school after the weekend. These are the old entrances to the old Royal Hill School, which is currently used by Charlton School.

Everyday, we will post a new photo of Greenwich. Would you like your photo featured here? Send images or links to photos on Flickr to editor@greenwich.co.uk

Filed Under: Magazine Tagged With: Daily Photo, Royal Hill

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