Little Crown, Rotherhithe

While many Pubs That Are Shut look -- to be brutally frank -- like they deserve to be shut, if not imploded, the closure of the Little Crown, with its traditional pub sign and promise of Brown Ale, looks like a sad loss to the community. Of course, this is conjecture, but looking at it one can imagine Last Orders-style scenes of boozy Cockney comraderie.

Just down the street is a Sky Sports-type establishment, which seems to be doing a roaring trade.



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There's better pictures of the Little Crown here and here.

New Concorde, Bermondsey

When you start looking for them, it seems, Pubs That Are Shut are everywhere (particularly in the SE16 area). We stumbled across this beauty during one of our biannual jogging sessions around the Bermondsey backstreets. Of its no doubt rich history, little is known: Googling the pub name didn't really tell us anything, although a quick search of Southwark's planning database revealed that it is being converted into flats.

Our favourite feature of the New Concorde is the sign on the front of the building which reads, in elegant script, "Live Music Weekends - Family Entertainment - Licensed for fun"*, over which somebody has plastered, in authoritarian Helvetica, "Warning - Keep out".

* Before 1997, premises in Britain hosting "fun" had to apply for a special licence. Almost all were refused.


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Manor Tavern, Bermondsey

Until recently, a stone's throw away from the Golden Lion was the Manor Tavern. Sturdy, no-nonsense and obviously closed for quite a while, the Manor was the original inspiration for this blog-o-site. Alas, before we got round to taking a photo of it, it was demolished, leaving nought but a steaming hole in the ground, where once a bluff, horny-handed cellarman might have changed barrels or cleaned pipes or whatever it is cellarmen do.

Fortunately for all concerned, somebody else had the foresight to take a picture of the pub last year in all its boarded-up glory, which you can see here.

The clear moral of this story is that we must henceforth spend every waking hour photographing these festering husks before they are flattened by the unstoppable juggernaut of progress.


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Golden Lion, Bermondsey

"Millwall pub": there's a combination of words to loosen the bowels of the respectable south London drinker. The Golden Lion, conveniently located round the corner from South Bermondsey station, oozed a certain earthy je-ne-sais-quoi, with its bold claims of "lager" and "spirits" (in a weird Optimal Character Recognition-type font, for some reason), until it shut earlier this year. As you can see, it's currently for sale: who knows, perhaps in a few months it will be REBORN as a hip urban boozer with real ale, an eclectic jukebox and vegetarian sausage and mash. That, or a tanning salon. Who can say?


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There's more about the Golden Lion on Beer In The Evening