Tag: Fuller’s pubs

Made of London

Amy OLeave a comment

When we visit London, my husband always wants to enjoy a London Pride, a cask ale that is made by Fuller’s brewery in London and served in pubs. Fuller’s not only brews beer, it owns many pubs in Southern England. London Pride is sometimes available in pubs that are not run by Fuller’s, but it’s always available in a Fuller’s-owned pub.

A “cask ale” is a form of beer that is unfiltered and unpasteurized and experiences a second fermentation inside the barrel. The barrel is delivered to the pub and, traditionally, placed in the basement where it would be chilled to the temperature of that basement. It’s drawn to the glass using gravity (if stored above the bar) or a hand pump (if stored below the bar).

I enjoy London Pride as well, but I’m not as committed to it as my husband. I like Guinness and, while in London, I enjoy exploring drinks with gin, a popular option in England. These are available everywhere. But when the spouse wants a London Pride, the pub scene is more limited.

At some point, we started making it a point to visit the local Fuller’s pubs in any neighborhood we are temporarily living in while we visit London. And later, that became trying to have a London Pride in every Fuller’s pub in London.

There are a lot of Fuller’s pubs in London and there is virtually no way we will hit them all, but we are making an honest attempt. And while I am not quite the London Pride afficionado my husband is, the more I find out about Fuller’s the more I really appreciate what they have done in building out their line of pubs. What I love most of all is that there is no attempt to make every pub like any other pub. Instead, Fuller’s often leans into the history of the pub’s building or neighborhood when naming and decorating the pub. Many of the pubs are in old, historic buildings or spaces that have been pubs for decades or even centuries.

When we arrived in London, we attempted to check into out hotel near Victoria Station, the July Victoria. We were a few hours before official check-in. Interesting and strange: our room was ready and they would be willing to check us in early, but for £15 an hour. We checked our bags and decided to go out and find a pub for lunch.

The nearest Fuller’s pub, The Jugged Hare, was a short walk away. We entered and walked over to the bar and requested a pint of London Pride, but were told that they didn’t have any currently available. One worker went downstairs to find out when London Pride would be available while the other helped us find another Fuller’s pub. We had a long chat with that worker. At last, the other worker came back and announced that he’d hooked up the next barrel. London Pride could now flow freely.

So we found seats and enjoyed our London Pride while perusing the menu for lunch. We also looked up the meaning behind “jugged hare.” Apparently, it’s a dish of old England in which a rabbit was cut up and placed in a jug. The jug was placed in boiling water and cooked for hours. The pub was located in a refurbished bank and had beautiful, dark wood panels. Decor included many different kinds of jugs and rabbit imagery.

No rabbit on the menu. My husband had a steak pie and I had a cheeseburger. My husband asked our server if the pub sold London Pride glasses. She disappeared for a long time and then came back with a glass. A gift from management. It looked like it had been through some things, and we were delighted to have it.

The next day, my husband and I were planning to engage in a number of activities around Highgate in North London (including the Arsenal match), so I’d made reservations at a Fuller’s pub called The Flask. We were threading the needle on timing between visiting a historic house and touring a historic cemetery, and were at the pub at a time that was certainly before the lunch rush. Beautiful historic pub with plenty of seating inside and a beautiful garden with seating outside.

We were seated near a toasty fireplace and served our beer. Our server was friendly and personable and when he heard about our mission to visit many Fuller’s pubs made some suggestions for ones we should target soon. He also told us some about The Flask, parts of which are very historic. The property includes a former stable that has been on the property since 1663 and some of the parts of the building housing the pub date to the 1700s, including what was until only recently the main bar. That area is now a small seating area. It still is surrounded with “bullseye glass” panels from the 1700s.

The name, “The Flask,” references water collection vessels sold by the pub many years ago that people would use to get water from a natural spring nearby.

The pub has a very colorful history and has served famous writers like Byron, Shelley, and Keats. More recently, it’s served the famous songwriters George Michael and Taylor Swift. My husband was shown the exact chair Taylor Swift sat in when she enjoyed her own London Pride. I have great admiration for Taylor Swift but I left her memory alone by remaining by the fire. Our server also told us Taylor had visited a kebab shop in Kentish Town. According to our server there are some amazing kebab shops in Kentish Town, but she went to the worst one.

Taylor, speak with your servers. They will never steer you to bad kebabs.

The Flask also has some resident ghosts, including a barmaid who hanged herself in the basement and a 17th century Cavalier who has been known to show up in uniform. Our server told us he’s never seen a ghost but sometimes at night he’s heard strange noises.

It was so early for lunch I just had a roasted tomato soup with a cheese toasty and an appetizer of roasted artichokes and kale. It was one of the yummiest things I ate on this trip.

Our server not only gave us some recommendations for Fuller’s pubs, he also suggested that we take a tour of the Fuller’s brewery. It had not occurred to us you could do that. So the next day, we trashed our plans for Sunday Roast and made reservations for a tour.

The Fuller’s brewery is in Chiswick and was formerly known as The Griffin brewery, lending to the griffin imagery that is associated with Fuller’s pubs. A brewery has been on site since the 1600s. John Fuller did not become involved in the brewery until the 1800s when the then-owners were in financial distress. His son, John Bird Fuller, was a founding father of the current iteration of the brewery, a joint operation with Henry Smith and John Turner, who had expertise in running breweries and brewing beer, respectively. Fuller, Smith & Turner was formed and has operated the brewery as of that partnership that started in the mid 1800s. The brewery currently operates as a subsidiary of the Japanese company Asahi since 2019. However, Fuller, Smith & Turner continue to own and operate the pubs we know as “Fuller’s pubs,” independently of the brewery.

Our tour took place on a Sunday so equipment was not operating but we were given an education on how beer is made and how “ale” differs from “beer” (used to be no hops in ale but now there is no difference). We were shown how the ingredients of the beer are processed. For example, water from the Thames is treated with gypsum to improve the taste and appearance and barley is toasted and milled to produce flavoring of various beers. We saw giant vats where barley and water are combined and processed to produce mash and the stainless steel vessels (formerly copper) in which the results are boiled and enhanced with hops and yeast. We also learned about the difference between barrels and kegs. We saw where the beer is placed in barrels and left to ferment further and the trucks that transport Fuller’s beer all around Southern England.

The tour concludes with a tasting. Our tour had about 8 people in it and by the time we found ourself in the tasting room, my husband had befriended four of them already. We enjoyed sampling Fuller’s various products while chatting with our new acquaintances.

I hadn’t realized until the tour that Fuller’s has two dark brews normally available, London Porter and Black Cab Stout. That London Porter is going to give my Guinness habit a run for its money.

And as for the London Pride name. There is the obvious connotation, but the beer also shares a name with a perennial flower that grew out of bombing sites during WWII that came to be known as a symbol of resilience. We saw a little planter on site containing the plants, although not blooming in November, of course. (There was also an amazing, centuries old wisteria vine, supposedly the oldest in the UK, growing up the side of one of the buildings. It was not blooming but that must be beautiful in the summer.)

The title of my post comes from a 2013 London Pride ad campaign. Given the history of the brewery, how Fuller’s is made with water from the Thames, and how Fuller’s honors London’s history with the pubs it owns, it really seems like more than a slogan to say it’s “Made of London.”

I created a new page to track our progress through Fuller’s pubs, here, if you’d like to follow along. Many, many more to go!

Planet Earth is blue

Amy OLeave a comment

Our trip to London to take in the Fulham match (and hopefully the Atletico Madrid Champions League semifinal match), was oddly dominated by David Bowie and water. That, and clicking in the Arsenal exchange every spare moment for a ticket to the Atletico match. My husband’s childhood friend was in London at the same time we were, so we also had fun catching up with him.

David Bowie had been a minor character in my teen world. I knew some of his music, most notably Space Oddity, a rock ballad about an astronaut who goes to the moon, but something goes wrong and he floats away, never to return to Earth. That particular song, a line from which I’ve borrowed as the title of this post, was initially released in 1969 but was re-released in the United States in 1972. Other versions have been released since then, but it’s the 1972 version I’m familiar with. Something about that song really captured my imagination. In my interpretation of the song, Major Tom decides not to go back to earth and enacts his ship’s malfunction. Apparently that is not how David Bowie saw it. Major Tom floated hopelessly away in his broken spaceship.

My interpretation is better.

I remember one of my high school classmates declaring “David Bowie is so gross.” I didn’t know enough about him to have an opinion but I had seen pictures of him and knew he did something very few men did at that time: he sometimes wore makeup and clothing more commonly associated with women. I was living in a conservative area of the country, but there is probably no place in the world that despises individuality and demands conformity more than high schools of the 1970s.

I had really loved Queen in high school. Funny now that I think of it that David Bowie would possibly be “gross” but Queen was A-ok. Bowie’s music took a turn that intersected more with my mainstream sensibilities in the early 1980s. I loved the collaboration he did in 1981 with Queen’s Freddie Mercury, Under Pressure. It’s still one of my favorite songs. And later it rubbed me the wrong way that Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby started with the same musical hook. (I feel more inclined to forgive Vanilla Ice now that Arsenal fans use Ice Ice Baby as the base of a chant to honor Declan Rice. Rice Rice, baby.)

David Bowie exploded into the mainstream with Let’s Dance in the early 1980s. I had moved to Denver after college and was working, but didn’t yet have enough money or income to buy a car. I was carpooling with one of my colleagues every day. He was the first openly gay person I’d ever known and often he would cajole me into accompanying him to one of the gay bars in our neighborhood before he dropped me off at my apartment. So many handsome men. None of them interested in me, other than as a human. It was pretty sweet. Let’s Dance and Modern Love were big hits on the dance floor. I think that’s where I decided it’s always ok to dance alone. And was the start of me thinking everybody just wear what you want. Be who you are. Try out stuff until you’re clear. Even you, David Bowie. (And I think he would say “No shit. That’s what I did.”)

Anyway, that is a long preamble to our visit to the new David Bowie exhibit in London called You’re Not Alone at Lightroom, a “multimedia spectacle” that will “transport visitors into the iconic performances and creative mind and spirit of one of the world’s most visionary and influential artists.” It reminded me of Frameless, the interactive art exhibit we visited when we were last in London.

After a brief introduction to a life timeline for Bowie, you enter a large auditorium-like room, the walls, ceiling, and floor being used to project images, video, artifacts supporting narrative about how and why Bowie created as he did. I guess it’s technically a documentary but creatively delivered and very well done. There’s very little I enjoy more than being immersed in creative process, and David Bowie left behind exceptional records about his work that were the basis of the presentation. And it did include Space Oddity in full, which allowed for some interesting visual effects.

We found that so interesting that we made a point on a different day to head over to V&A East and V&A East Storehouse, new extensions of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

At V&A East we visited fascinating exhibits on “Why we make,” focused on the impulse to create and the process of creation. Not merely creation of art, but furniture, clothing, housing. I have found the Victoria & Albert museum in Kensington to be overwhelming, but the V&A East is very, very manageable and no less interesting. Bonus: it has a patio with a great view of the area where the Olympic stadium is. Which, by the way, is currently the home of West Ham. Arsenal were to be playing West Ham at London Stadium the weekend after we visited. We made sure to walk over and spread our Arsenal cooties all around the ground after visiting the exhibits.

The V&A East Storehouse is a short walk from V&A East. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s literally a storehouse for objects owned by the Victoria & Albert, but not currently on display in the museum. Except it’s the fanciest Storehouse you’ll ever lay eyes on. It’s a museum-like storehouse. You can walk around and look at the objects, which we did.

You can also visit a special area devoted to David Bowie. The David Bowie Centre is a permanent archive for David Bowie’s possessions that was given to the V&A. It contains a small exhibit that includes some iconic costumes worn by Bowie, objects he owned, and a narrative and artifacts about how some of his music was written (including hand-written starts at several songs, including Space Oddity, which was written almost like a play). It also includes archives of interviews, articles, reviews that are not on display but can be accessed upon request. He must have understood his own importance or he would never have retained all that stuff. And I guess he was right about his importance or the V&A would not now have it. Great exhibit.

Space Oddity tells us “planet earth is blue,” and we understand it’s blue because of the water on its surface. Our visit to London, coincidentally, included several water-related activities. The River Lea lies between the V&A East and London Stadium and there’s a place on the edge where you can rent a swan boat. Along with a bevy of school-aged kids, we decided we needed to do that. We discovered that swan boats are just the right size for me to peddle at 5′ 2″ and completely wrong for my husband at 6′ 2″. After a very short trip down river, we crossed this activity off our list.

On one of the days we were in town there was a boat festival, the IWA Canalway Cavalcade, near something called “Little Venice.” Having seen Bangkok’s version of “Little Venice” in January, I wasn’t expecting much that resembled Venice. Although the one in London did not, in the end, look at all like Venice, it was very charming and fun to see all the houseboats gathered together. There were many vendors and activities for the kids and we enjoyed walking along the canal on a nice day. My husband noticed that you can take a boat from Little Venice over to Camden so we hopped aboard and enjoyed the scenery for the 45-minute ride.

We also did a walking tour of the hidden River Fleet. This is a river that once visibly flowed through early London but became nasty, dirty, stinky and was covered with roads in the 1700s. It’s now, more or less, a sewage canal. Once before we had tried to find the headway for the river, but with construction near it along the Thames it’s impossible to see. But you can “see” and hear it underneath streets in parts of London.

Tourist taking photo of picturesque River Fleet.

We did a few things that have nothing to do with David Bowie or water, but do take place on Planet Earth. We visited the Somerset House for the 2026 SONY World Photography Awards exhibit. The exhibit included entries by amateurs and professionals in various categories, including portraits, landscapes, still life. I have no idea how they picked winners. It was all so good.

We also went over to an event called Sicily Fest. This was in a big hall in Islington, and held a bunch of vendors selling Sicilian food and drinks as well as a very popular Sicilian band. We attended a church service at Southwark Cathedral, home of Hodge the cat, who indeed was wandering around during the service and stopped by to sniff my husband.

And, as always, we found ourselves in a number of Fuller’s pubs. In my favorite experience, on the first day we were there, we really loved the glasses the Sutton Arms served our London Pride in. They had a depiction of the Thames that was very cool. We asked the bartender if it were possible to buy one. He said “Just take one. We have so many. And they always just walk away, especially with people drinking outside.” We were not quite in the sticky fingers frame of mind. While we sipped, ate a very delicious pizza, and watched the world go by through a large, open door, I googled how easy it would be to buy a glass. We found that Amazon could deliver such an item to us in the UK but not in Chicago. We enjoyed our beer in those beautiful glasses and left them behind. Here’s hoping enough will be retained by the London pubs for us to enjoy one again on a future trip.

A new hood & Fuller’s pub crawl

Amy OLeave a comment

After so many recent stays in Tower Hill, we were ready for a fresh, new place we’d never been. So for this trip, my husband selected a boutique hotel called Ruby Lucy in Lambeth. Lambeth is a neighborhood south of the Thames. It’s situated close to the Waterloo train and underground station, kind of a cool, old station. The station was exceedingly busy at all times, droves of people standing in front of the entrance to the tracks, staring at the board on which their track was to be assigned.

Ruby Lucy was a quirky little hotel with a great lobby and fairly spacious rooms. Each floor has an open tea station just outside the elevators and a communal iron board. Our room had a comfy queen bed and one of those crazy showers that is open-glassed on two sides to the room. It had a curtain on the outside of the shower; i.e., if you’ve failed to plan before you start your shower, the person in the room gets the choice of whether to draw the curtains or not. Good to be well enough acquainted before the trip so the choice made by the person not in the shower creates no drama.

The hotel is located on Lower Marsh Street, which was a real find. Although we were quite close to the London Eye, Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, the neighborhood had the feel of being very far from all of those things. Funky and a bit gritty, the street was closed to all but bike and foot traffic and, during the day, had a great little market with mostly street food. There were so many other food options available that we never partook of the street food, but it was extremely tempting. We went to a nice Thai restaurant, Sino Thai, for dinner on the day we arrived and enjoyed Cuban tapas at Cubano the next night. We had a yummy breakfast at Balance one morning.

One of the cooler things about the neighborhood was an attraction I’d never heard of before, Leake Street Arches. We had been walking down Lower Marsh Street waiting for our hotel room to be made up when I noticed a garden path leading to what looked like an underground tunnel. Inside was a broad arch covered with some of the coolest graffiti I’ve ever seen. According to the web site, “London’s largest legal graffiti wall.” An artist was working on some fresh art with a can of spray paint.

My husband, who you may recall was recovering from a concussion on our last visit and not drinking, was looking forward to visiting all the Fuller’s pubs we could. With three in the immediate neighborhood, we were able to make a good dent in his goal. His favorite beer is a Fuller’s product called London Pride. I bought some for him for Christmas at Binny’s but it’s just not the same as knowing that it is being drawn from a cask in the basement of the pub. Or so I’ve heard. The Fuller’s pubs in our neighborhood were nice but not quite the pub experience we wanted. One day we left our neighborhood for the highly rated The Harp in Covent garden. Great pub with a fun crowd AND the requisite London Pride. But no food, so after one round and a great conversation with some interesting folks, we crossed the street to visit The Admiralty, a place we’d eaten on one of our visits in December. Also a Fuller’s pub. 5 Fuller’s pubs in all; not bad for a trip with boots on the ground for three nights.