The Harp Review: Britain’s Best Pub Is a Corridor

Chandos Place holds the first London pub ever to win CAMRA National Pub of the Year. There is nowhere to sit.

In early 2011 the Harp on Chandos Place became the first pub in London ever to be named CAMRA National Pub of the Year. It beat every pub in the country. It has since collected the local branch title more or less annually, has appeared in the Good Beer Guide for as long as anyone can be bothered to check, and was once called by the Evening Standard the best pub in London.

It is a corridor. It is a felt-lined corridor with a bar down one side and it seats perhaps thirty people, of whom you will not be one.

What you are actually being awarded

The awards are for the beer, and the beer is the point, and the beer is beyond argument. Seven or so hand pumps. Harvey’s, Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, Dark Star, a rotating guest that is always the one you want. Ciders and perries in bag-in-box, from all over the country, kept properly.

Above your head, the ceiling and the beams are covered in pump clips – hundreds of them, going back years, a hanging archive of every beer the pub has ever guested. You will spend a lot of time looking at it, because you will be standing directly underneath it, because there is nowhere to sit.

Binnie

The Harp was the Welsh Harp until 1995, when it was taken over by Bridget Walsh, known universally as Binnie, an Irishwoman with a serious commitment to real ale. She ran it as a tenant, then bought it outright, then spent fifteen years turning a small pub in a bad spot into the best pub in Britain, largely through the radical technique of caring about the beer and refusing to install a television.

She sold to Fuller’s in 2014. The regulars held their breath. Fuller’s, to their considerable credit, did not ruin it, which in the British pub industry counts as a heroic act and should probably carry a medal.

The seating situation, addressed directly

There is a small upstairs snug. It is full. There is a passage out the back. It is full. There are stools by the wall. They were taken at 4pm by a man with a book and he is not going anywhere and he knows exactly what he has.

The Prat’s field team logged the Harp on a Monday evening in low season and recorded a standing density of 2.1 persons per square metre, a figure the Institute for Public House Capacity in Tooting classifies as “Northern Line, Bank branch, 8:40am.” People do this voluntarily. People do this and then go home and write that it was wonderful, because it was.

The one complaint that recurs

Drinking-up time is enforced with what several reviewers describe as zeal. At 11pm the Harp would like you to leave, and it would like you to leave now, and the fact that you have been standing in a corridor for four hours and have grown attached to your particular square foot of it will not be taken into account.

Verdict

The best pint in central London, served in the least comfortable room in central London, and everyone involved has decided this is a fair trade. It is. Go on a Tuesday afternoon. Look up at the ceiling. Understand that you are in the presence of something that got everything right by refusing to do anything clever.

Official site: harpcoventgarden.com.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]