BV London Pub of the Year 2024-25 - the results

Go on then, let's have a winner, shall we?!?

It's been a close contest this year, particularly deciding which of the ten pubs make my top five and which will have to sit out next years competition to make way for plucky young upstart newcomers, but thems the breaks...

Indeed, last year's winner, the Star & Garter in Bromley has narrowly failed to make the final this year and I do feel a slight pang of sadness, but I'm sure they'll be back. (If you haven't read parts one and two, this won't mean a whole lot of jack shit, so check those out first!)

Right...

BV London Pub of the Year 2024-25 - part two

Welcome to the second half of the 2024-25 London Pub of the Year award. 

In the first installment we revisited last years top five, and now we're going to check out five brand new entries. (Well, two of them are brand new, the other three are, in Top-of-the-Pops parlance, re-entries, but what the fucky hey.)

Let's chuffing well crack on, shall we?

The Tragedy about a Daylight Robbery

Earlier this year, we saw The Play That Goes Wrong at the Duchess Theatre. All things considered, it's a pretty good production, subverting as it does a wide range of theatrical tropes to comedic effect. I laughed quite a bit. All good so far.

Then, a few weeks later we went to see the spin-off, Peter Pan Goes Wrong, which was less fun - perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the supply of ideas for stuff that can go wrong was probably thin on the ground following the sheer number of things that, rightly, went wrong in The Play That Goes Wrong.

Nonetheless, it was still just about worth watching, in a sort of pantomimey, passing-the-timey sort of way.

No more paltry poultry

There are few foodstuffs more homogenised in our culture than chicken.

In Britain we eat more than a pound per person per week, but the vast majority is consumed as a staple commodity, without pride or pleasure. It's the 'sliced white' of the meat industry, for sure. 

We're happy eating it in nugget, tikka or Coronation form, but are we maybe doing a disservice to the humble chicken by passing it off as a mere canvas for more interesting things? I like a Chicken Jalfrezi and I'll happily polish off a giant plate of buffalo wings. But, let's be honest, none of these are really about the chicken, are they?

A nicely roasted free-range chicken can be a thing of beauty for sure, but we hardly ever eat it these days. Sadly, we're far more likely to be stopping off at Chicken Cottage at 2AM for cheap battery chicken scraps, where the lack of underlying flavour is concealed by swathes of fat and a secret blend of herbs and spices. It's depressing; probably more so if you're a chicken!

Hello, Goodbye?

All good things come to an end, and having been granted several stays of execution, the BV London Pub of the Year - the awesome Catford Bridge Tavern - finally closed its doors for the last time on Sunday night.

We laughed. We cried. We reminisced about old times. We looked to the future. We told old war stories and sang sad songs of lost loves and drowned kittens and the guy who got a death row pardon two minutes too late. Actually, some of that is just lies and Alanis Morrisette. Disregard.

A seamless transition from old to new

But, impressively, they were able to keep going for several weeks longer than expected after the pub was sold from underneath their feet. And this was no sad shell of its former self, staggering on waiting to die either: Whereas some pubs would be running down their stocks and taking it easy in this situation, the CBT continued to put on tasty new beers right up until the final hours.

The last pint I had in the place was perfectly alright, but the penultimate one... Oh Boy!

You know I'm a sucker for big, hoppy, American-style IPAs, and Wild Beer 'Fresh #1' (5.5%) will go down as one of most fantastic beers I've ever had the pleasure of drinking. Pale, refreshing and bursting with juicy, citrussy hops, it's every bit as good as the very best IPAs from the USA. And, as I've come to expect from the CBT, in absolutely flawless condition.

Perhaps even more impressively (OK, not to me - the beer is the most impressive thing to me! - but maybe to others?) the team were up and running in the CBT's replacement pub just four days later. Four fucking days, dude.

Huzzah for the Hussar!

'There's nothing new under the sun', goes the appropriately old phrase, and it oh-so-often rings true. Except when it doesn't, obviously.

But, for grumpy, prematurely-old fogeys such as I, it frequently seems like that which is new is no fucking good, and that which is any fucking good is stuff with which I am already familiar.

Music these days? Shit. TV these days? Shit. Films these days? Shit with Ben Shitting Affleck acting all shit.

OK, so I'm exaggerating just a tad. Some stuff which is technically new, though not necessarily widely promoted, is actually pretty good. Look hard enough and you'll find decent music and films and everything else made very recently indeed. And some things - like beer - are probably better and more exciting now than they've ever been. New beers are good, they're fucking, shitting good!

But my point is that, if you often struggle to see the merit in the latest stuff and are baffled by the faddishness around it, there is another path to tread which is a bit more interesting than just sticking with what you know and never expanding your horizons...