Pre-wedding pub crawl in London

Apparently you're not allowed to have stag dos anymore. It seems that nowadays husbands to be aren't keen on ritual humiliation. So I'll just say I recently found myself going out for some pre-wedding drinks with friends.

We set off from Waterloo and passed some mysterious boats whilst heading north of the river

What's going on there I've no idea but I bet it makes them ill.

Our first stop was meant to be the Lyceum Tavern.

Sadly the staff were enjoying conjugal relations with close relatives so it wasn't bleedin' open. Fortunately our next stop was.

The Coach and Horses must have been a Watney's pub at some point.

Which reminds me of the joke about the innocent lad visiting London for the first time. He calls his dad from the payphone in the corner of the room and say's it's all going really well. He's found a building with a red light outside with lots of friendly people in it. "Get out of there" his dad shouts back, "that's a Watney's house!".

No Watney's for us though, but the fact the groom didn't even finish his first pint was an indicator of how things went. Poltroonery and senile lightweightism meant we were all on to halves depressingly early.

An innovation in pub crawling was the detour to a hat shop. It was certainly different but I'm not sure it will catch on.

The next pub was surprisingly named after the classic Dumpy's Rusty Nuts instrumental Crosskeys.

I must say I fully approve of this and we even did a little jig outside in the traditional manner.

The beers were from Greene King and Brodies, and perhaps more importantly the crisps were from Tayto.

It was a Sam Smith's pub next so no chance of more Taytos there.

The beer was getting to the bottom of the barrel too, so my mates had some pretty rough beer.

But fear not, I'd got the first pint and mine was fine. The Flying Horse followed, where again the beer wasn't great.

Nice malt and hops table downstairs though.

Then it was The Fitzroy, another Sam Smith's pub. Given the experience in the previous one it was declared that keg beer was an acceptable choice.

The lager came in a very thin glass as you can't see in this photo:

There was also a breakthrough in finding non-own label products:

With the angostura bitters the count is now up to three. On the way to our next pub we were tempted to go off piste by a dodgy George Orwell plaque.

Good job too, as not only was The Wheatsheaf a cracking pub...

...it had Landlord and Exmoor Gold on on. I had a pint in this one, I can't resist Landlord.

The Dog and Duck followed.

I think I had a beer called "Dave" in this one.

And guess who used to drink here?

It was getting a bit like Krays pubs in the East End. I guess Orwell drank in a lot of pubs in central London. Another Coach and Horses was our next stop.

I was a bit suspicious of the trough at the bottom of the bar in here. I wonder if it was originally for gobbing in?

Nice pub though, and more pleasantly they had four types of picked eggs. I was also far enough gone to buy one.

This is the beetroot one:

Didn't taste of beetroot, or vinegar either, which counts in its favour if you ask me.

Our next stop was for its historical significance, as they don't serve pints or real ale in the French House. We were scoring the pubs using the Scientific Scoring System and I had to save one of my friends from straying from ecumenicalism into outright heresy when he tried to give it a point for beer quality as "his Guinness was nice".

It was back to beer as god intended at the Lyric, though the pub only scored a lowly three out of ten.

As did the Queens Head, but we were definitely flagging by this point.

The Conquest of Bread

We made a last stop at The Harp and then it was time to pour ourselves home.

The Scientific Scoring System was used throughout the pub crawl.

We determined that the Dog and Duck was the best pub. Subjectively I'd preferred The Wheatsheaf, which really shows the importance of rigorous scientific analysis so pub quality can be objectively determined.