"Then it is dark; a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains." - John Cheever

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Contemporary Scottish Bar in London...

Has anyone come across this? Maybe we should go for a Fitzroy Tuesday summer excursion?

http://www.albannach.co.uk/

7 comments:

Col said...

Willing to check it out, though concept maybe a bit contrived. Trafalgar square, whiskies £6 a shot probably. I'd like to see an authentic highland bar in London - one with plastic seats, formica tables, old guys with beards and sheepdogs giving you suspicious/disapproving looks (the old boys and the dogs), mcewans export for £1.30 a pint but nothing else on tap, guys inexplicably wearing Rangers tops despite being 200 miles from Glasgow etc.

John said...

pint and a nip £1.90 for OAPs...

John said...

how do you define Scottish?

John said...

It's interesting that you don't really get "Scottish" pubs in London the way you get Irish ones (by which I mean the places in north london with hurling on the telly, not O'Neils etc). Is this because Scots coming to London are (in a Boswellian stylee) generally trying to assimilate into London society more than the Irish? Or is it more to do with the relative sizes of the Scots / Irish London populations?

Anyway - here's another - "Edinburgh Castle" in Camden. The Scots and the Irish navvies had their own pubs to go to when they were constructing the railway cutting north of Euston apparently (Irish one's the Dublin Castle - I think there might be a Welsh equivalent too).

Tom said...

There was an Edinburgh Castle near where I used to live in Newington Green, but oddly it was more of an Irish pub. You certainly don't get Scottish equivalents of Kilburn, where entire neighbourhoods (including of course pubs) have strong Irish identities.

John said...

It's the "Edinburgh Cellars" isn't it? (I go past it on the bus most days).

John said...

of course, up in Edinburgh Rankin/Rebus drinks in the Oxford Bar...