North Manchester CAMRA Pub Crawl

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Manchester Cathedral District Wednesday 30th September 2015 Lack of money kept me away from the Campaign For Real Ale (CAMRA) activities for most of September. I was able to accompany the group on the last pub study of the month though. We started out at the relatively new Beer House Bar, situated in Victoria Railway Station. This proved to be a lovely but rather overpriced bar, which looks quite ornate but for some inexplicable reason puts empty (clean) bake bean tins on the tables to hold food cutlery, making it look as if diners have left the remnants of their bring it in yourself camp-fire food on the tables. The unisex toilets are protected by a coded lock and customers have to get the code from the staff. This is to stop rail commuters using the bar’s toilets rather than the public ones they now have to pay to use - which they never used to have to do at the station. Our next stop was The Old Wellington Inn, which was very relaxed inside, as most drinkers sat outside in the unseasonal sunshine. We all agreed this was the best pub of the night. We were going to visit a bar called The Mitre Hotel, an old favourite of mine, but many members decided that it had too limited a drinks selection so we skipped it and went instead to an unscheduled stop - the appropriately named Cosy Club, another new pub in a city still hit by more pubs closing than opening up lately. This proved to be a lovely bar in the now rather depleted Triangle shopping district that replaced Manchester’s flea market stalls in the Corn Exchange complex. We finished off at one of Manchester’s two Crown And Anchor bars, a pub with limited real ale choices but a perfectly reasonable selection nevertheless. We drew the crawl to an earlier close than usual as a big international football match played in the city meant that the transport network would soon get very busy. It was a terrific night out though in good company with a few people attending who I haven’t seen for a while. Arthur Chappell