Secrets Of My Pub Sign Photo Walks

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When choosing the places to go to take photos of pub signs, I try to plan my journey quite strategically before I set off. Getting signs close to home was easy, as I pass the bars all the time anyway, but I soon got most of the pubs in Manchester (where I lived when my hobby started) and Preston, where I live now. To get more signs means traveling further from home. Sometimes I get buses or trains out to a town just to take photos there. Most of my walking is in city centre and urban areas. Other times I visit another city on business or for other events, but I try to find extra time to get some pub sign photos during my visit. I favour the big towns and cities as there are usually more pubs there close together. Small village and country pubs are great but often miles apart from one another and away from bus and train routes too. Sometimes in the early days I got to a fresh town and just randomly walked around, knowing there would be pubs in most major streets. Later I would find that I had unwittingly passed close by streets with even more pubs I could have captured had I known they were there. Nowadays however, I plan my trips with near military precision. I found on revisiting cities like Liverpool without preparation I would end up seeing the same pubs I saw on previous visits, so I started getting together advance lists of the pubs still to find. I use book like good pub / beer guides and tourist web sites for a town to find pubs but my main check lists come from the website Pub Galore which lists most (they do miss some) bars in any given town, or post code area. I go on, copy out the main pubs in an area that I’m interested in, and also make a list of the streets they are on. There might be fifty pubs but if eight are in one street with lots of others in streets clustered round it, I’ll head to that area as a priority. I also look up anything I can find on the history of a town’s pubs and prioritize the ones with the richest backgrounds for heading towards. I select the most recommended real ale bar as the ones to go into for drinks too. On most walks in a fresh town I get 50-60 pub sign photos. On one trip to London I got 127 in one day. My next trip to London in April this year will see me staying in Hounslow so I am already checking out the bars round there. The Normandy D-Day Landings probably took less organizing. Youtube – The pubs galore page for my home area city centre. Arthur Chappell