Confederacy of a Dunce

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

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Rather than tread well-traveled ground with a listing of high-rated pubs, I thought I'd wander off in the other direction and give a sort of reckoning of the other end of the scale across north London. I'm sorry to say these may not be close enough to each other for a "pub crawl of misery" to be practical, although intrepid readers are welcome to try.

The measure of misery is taken from user ratings at Beer in the Evening, as are the comments (below). Reviews are excerpted from fancyapint. In order to qualify as "miserable" a pub must have an average rating of 2.0 or below (on a 0-10 scale) with a minumum of five raters. Areas covered are London postcodes beginning with "N" (hence, N and NW).

The pub crawl starts with some fairly innocuous pubs (at least according to visitor comments) and degenerates rapidly.

Miserable North London pub crawl
Pub name	Location	Rating	Comments [sic]	(Partial) Review
The George	Belsize Park	1.7	Dull, very dull.	Sorry, but there's really no reason to drink here....The George has the ambience, but not the prices, of a student union.
Belsize	Belsize Park	2.0	Turned a decent pub into something ghastly.	[FP disagrees]: Agreeable and vaguely old-fashioned boozer that does gastropub food without being unnecessarily pretentious.
The Lansdowne	Primrose Hill	1.6	I got so annoyed by this place that I started pissing up and down the walls of the toilet. This is something I should be ashamed of, but I don't.	Expensive, conceited and soulless. There are better in the area. In fact, they're all better.
Belushi's	Camden	0.6	this pub can gurantee a fight every friday/saturday night because of the youngsters drinking smirnoff ice and thinking they are better than others, best avoided	[not listed]
Blackstock	Finsbury Park	1.0	This is one nasty pub. Smells of cleaning fluid. Fortunately there are 2 doors so when you walk in you can continue straight ahead and walk out the otherside.	An often intimidating place packed with locals and drunks - give it a swerve.
White Lion Of Mortimer	Finsbury Park	1.8	On a busy night, drunken arguments frequently break out. If the participants are not too drunk to walk, these often spill outside providing street entertainment for the passerby's. Durning the day, reminisent of a funeral home where the corpses are still alive.	[not listed]
The Fox	Palmer's Green	1.0	full of kids who think they are gangsters. Horrible beer and a generally rough crowd.	A fixture on Green Lanes when all around was still fields, this one's been Breezer'd up to pull in a youngish clientele.
Green Man	Muswell Hill	1.6	My first 5 minutes inside there and there was a fight between 2 kids, someone was being sick in the toilet and the staff ignored me...	The place seems to fulfill a purpose as a pre-club hangout for the local nitespot behind the pub.

So there you have it. Start in Belsize Park where the pubs are badly rated because visitors feel they deserve better in that area, wander on down to the lowest rated pub in Camden, then a couple stops in the vicinity of Finsbury Park before making your way to the Fox, then the Green Man (before clubbing the night away in aforementioned "local nitespot", apparently Muswell Hill's own Enigma).

consume

Wednesday, April 13, 2005 1:15:05 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)