All Points East 2026

The August 2026 instalment of my annual standing in a park watching noisy bands series.  PropUptheBar was off to Victoria Park for the Outbreak day at All Points East.
But before frazzling my brain and making my ears ring, a few pubs and bars were in order.

My day started with 'Spoons - a line I should just cut and paste for 50% of the blog posts.

Goldengrove (146-148 The Grove, Stratford, E15 1NS)
This time in the heart of Stratford, the pub with a respectable hanging basket display and pavement seating where you can watch the multi-lane road junction.
This is a relatively early JDW, opened in 1993 as the chain was expanding throughout the capital.  It has graced the Good Beer Guide in the past, but coffee or Carlsberg was the order of the day from a decent midday Sunday crowd

The 'Cowcatcher' American pale from East London Brewing Co. was my pick.
A bit flat and dull, probably because of the lack of use the hand pump was getting, but drinkable and who am I to complain at £2.40 a pint in London.
The outdoor space to the back and side of the Goldengrove looked good, although I opted to sit inside and watch the coffee machine break down and people complaining about dirty cutlery.

When I wasn't taking really poor pictures of carpets and knees, I was tenuously sketching out a mini-crawl of Stratford pubs.  But this was instantly kyboshed when I walked to the GBG-listed Old Black Bull and found it closed in contradiction to opening hours online.
So I set my sights on Hackney Wick instead, under-taking the West Ham walk...

Hackney Wick was once an area of derelict factories and auto repair shops that few folks would have cause to come to.  It's changed a bit.
I visited Crate when it first opened here in 2012 with the smart new Olympic buildings having been constructed across the other side of the canal.  Fourteen years later, with the West Ham crowds descending each matchday and general gentrification demanding old run down areas have brewery taps and cool bars, Hackney Wick is alive with colourful graffiti and hipster vibes.

Crate looked busy, but just around the corner, Howling Hops was still getting going on a Sunday afternoon, a handful of folks outside, inside practically empty.

Howling Hops Tank Bar (Unit 9 Queens Yard, White Post Lane, Hackney Wick, E9 5EN)
Howling Hops began life in the cellar of Hackney's marvellous Cock Tavern in 2012.  They soon outgrew that space and moved three years later to the 'Wick, setting up in an old brick warehouse. 
The main bar is 10-meters long, beer poured direct from a run of 10 tanks lining the back of it.

I picked the Howling Hops 'Shadow Boxer', a 5.1% brown ale, other options including a sour, a Dortmunder pilsner and several varieties of tropical and hoppy pale ales.
You ideally need lots of folks on those long benches.  So, a little bit lacking in atmosphere on this occasion, but I did have a superb beer and I had Cedric Im Brookes belting out 'Give Rasta Glory' in the background, so all was fine.

A short walk past the station took me to the current Good Beer Guide entry, the taproom for online retailers Beer Merchants.

Beer Merchants Tap (99 Wallis Road, Hackney Wick, E9 5LN)
Opened in 2018, this is real world manifestation of the 'great beer to your door' website store.  
Where you get the opportunity to bust your budget perusing fridges full of cans and bottles to take away or drink in, as well as having plenty of stunning draft options from 20 keg lines. There are a couple of handpumps, just one of these in action on my visit, serving Beak 'Luma' table beer. 

At £7.25 a pint for a 3.5% hazy pale, I'd rapidly increased in beer cost since my start in Spoons.  But the beer was good, served in decent condition, with a pick of the quiet benches inside the old warehouse space, or a seat in the sunny yard outside.
I somehow resisted the temptation of the 16% imperial stout on draft.

I'd heartily recommend a visit to Beer Merchants.  A great beer list.  Possibly best tackled when you don't have a day at a music festival ahead of you.

There are plenty of other spots to eat and drink here, but none quite as stand-out colourful as the Lord Napier.

The Lord Napier (25 White Post Lane, Hackney Wick, Homerton, E9 5EN)
Go back in time and this pub would have served as a local for the factory workers when this bit of the city was a hive of industry.  What would those drinkers think if they could be transported into the future: seeing it full of hip young folk, painted colourfully, featuring a karaoke room and roof garden, with weird beer that costs an-arm-and-a-leg?  Not a lot, probably.
Opened in 1868, it spent most of it's years as an Ind Coope house.  It sat boarded-up and un-loved from 1995 until it was resurrected in 2021.
A Five Points pump clip was turned around, so I opted for the local Neckstamper 'Bluffer' on keg.

I'm glad I paid the Lord Napier a visit, but suspect I may have liked it more in the 1980s with a Double Diamond in front of me.

The nearby pedestrian flyover took me across the A2 and into Victoria Park, skirting the barriers which made up the back of the music festival site.
Gate opening times seemed a little too close to the first bands of the day and I didn't fancy shuffling through a big queue, hence the short diversion to a trad pub in the side-streets.

The Eleanor Arms (460 Old Ford Road, Bow, E3 5JP)
Being one of the closest pubs to Victoria Park, this was doing a roaring trade with festival goers, the old-boy propping up the end of the bar eying the invasion of blokes in black band t-shirts with suspicion.
It's a cracking old two-roomed pub with pool table in the back and a few surviving period features, including some lovely wood panelling.

Sadly, the influx of customers didn't mean they were racing through the barrels of real ale.  I ordered some Tayto crisps and an East London Brewing Co. 'Foundation' (the alternative being a Southwark 'Mayflower').  In ropey condition, almost in as poor a form as the Aston Villa team being hammered by Brighton on TV.

Right...let's get into that festival...

Through the gates remarkably easily with no queue, no phone mishaps retrieving my ticket, and nothing setting off the metal detectors.
I headed straight into the big tent to watch San Francisco blackgaze metallers Deafheaven.  

You'll be wanting to see a picture of Liam's son Gene Gallagher playing one of the smaller stages...

And you'll be wanting to see my favourite t-shirt of the day (although with something in the region of 3,000 Deftones shirts, competition was thin on the ground)...

And you'll be wanting to see the beer list...
If you weren't put off this festival by my mention of 'blackcore metallers', you will be once you see the beverage prices.

Much less 'craft' than what I'd gotten used to at Wide Awake festival for the past couple of years.  Madri possibly not 'excepcional' enough to warrent costing 5p short of eight quid.
At least there were a couple of interesting alternatives, the 'Space Hops' by Beyond Belief the one that caught my eye.

But...hells bells...that frothy head of indeterminate size within a cardboard cup is irritating when handing over £8.25 for a 'pint'.
Talking of hells bells, I was off to watch punk-rockers Amyl & the Sniffers who've been credited with taking the baton from AC/DC as Australia's prino heavy-riffin' rabble-rousers.

Yet I enjoyed old favourites Idles more.
A band I've now seen three times - each and every one of them in Victoria Park.  I'm led to believe they do play in other places.

I didn't catch nearly as many bands as I intended to, the heat and the swirling dust blowing up from what was once grass making it less appealing to be racing from one end of the site to the other.
The day ended watching Deftones from a distance, then a march to Mile End station and the painful Oxford Tube bus trip home.  At which point the pre-festival pub crawl seemed like a much more foolhardy idea than it had done at 11am.

Spalding - Never Mind the Tulips

Saturday 15th August: The football season was getting underway for most of the 72 league clubs, Reading and Luton providing the early-kick off 7-goal thriller.  Don't expect the same excitement from the billion pound Prem teams when they get going next weekend.
It was already week 2 for the National League North and I was on the road to attend Oxford City FCs first away game of 26/27 in the southern reaches of Lincolnshire.

Spalding sits in the Fens between Peterborough and Boston, is home to just over 30,000 folks, famous for tulips and pumpkins.
Wetherspoon's would inevitably be my first port of call being as it's in the 2026 Good Beer Guide and I was arriving early and am quite partial to a second breakfast. 
Forget mobility scooters outside pubs.  This was parked outside the Ivy Wall...

Sadly the pub itself is less photogenic than the horse and cart.  The glass-fronted affair will disappoint anyone hoping for an ancient market town building or a wall of ivy for that matter.

The Ivy Wall (18-19 New Rd, Spalding PE11 1DQ)

Inside, it's one of those long narrow 'Spoons with lines of regimented tables and the bar towards the back.  I reckon Tim Martin himself would be hard-pushed to identify some of the locations if faced with 'Where in the World of Spoons Am I' contest. 

There is a separate room to the back which was proving popular for families with pushchairs, plus an outdoor patio where a fair few customers had settled despite the overcast morning.
The search for something a little bit different ended in the smart toilets, where you get a glass-fronted display of no-lo beers to peruse whilst at the urinals.

The guest cask ales on my visit were Hadrian Borders 'Northumbrian Gold' or Ilkley 'Ruby Jane'.  The Northumbrian for me - a malty 4.5% ale, more brown than golden.

My breakfast wrap picture comes solely for the purpose of my continued grumble about the size of extra baked bean portions.  50/50 recently for me, as to whether £1.08 buys a decent size bowl or the thimble-sized ramekin.  Thimble-size in Spalding...

Moving on, a short stroll round to the market place took me to the Red Lion hotel, complete with 'Jimi Hendrix Stayed Here' blue plaque.

The Red Lion Hotel (Market Place, Spalding, PE11 1SU)
The Red Lion is a smart 18th century inn with a seating area in front of it providing people-watching opportunities in the heart of the town.  Hendrix's stay is the big claim-to-fame, his visit made during the Spring Bank Holiday in 1967 when the Barbeque '67 festival took place in the Tulip Bulb Hall.  Hendrix reputedly hung out in the hotel bar with Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker, before sharing a bill with Geno Washington, Zoot Money, Cream, Pink Floyd and The Move, amongst others.  Tickets £1.

Passing the busy outdoor tables, the marvellous tiled flooring in the doorway makes for a good first impression...

Which just gets better...

A rare outlet for Bass in this area, apparently.
The building looks big from the outside, although the public bar just takes up the front room with seating either side of the door, a dining room glimpsed down a corridor beyond the check-in desk.
If you don't fancy the Bass, Sharpe's 'Cornish Best' or Black Sheep 'Best Bitter' were available. 

A good pint of Bass in a cracking pub.

With a fair number of 'No Cask Ale' venues in the town centre, the remaining place that I really wanted to visit was the Priors Oven, achieving top pint-pot marking scores on the CAMRA website.

The Priors Oven (1 Sheep Market, Spalding, PE11 1BH)
This was once part of the Priory of Spalding, the structure dating back to around 1230.  With its distinctive shape and vaulted ceiling, this bit of the building once served as a monastic prison, becoming a bakery in later years, then the first micropub in Lincolnshire in 2013.
It looks great, not needing many folks to fill it up with just four tables and a couple of stools at the bar.

There were three cask ales available: Humpty Dumpty 'Hathor' alongside 'New Mexico' pale ale or 'Dr Fox's Cunning Linctus' bitter, both brewed by local Tydd Steam. 
All priced at £4 a pint and served on gravity from casks behind the bar.
The cask coolers must have been doing their job throughout the recent hot weather, as the New Mexico was on great form - a crisp hoppy pale ale. 

With plenty of time on my hands, I strolled to the historic Ayscoughfee Hall which houses a small museum of local history and curios.  Well worth a visit.
The gardens to the rear of the house were playing host to a festival with music and games and deckchairs, but sadly Shake It Off Stage, the Taylor Swift tribute act at 15:40 clashed with the football.
Probably not a line-up which will go down in history like the Barbeque '67, so I departed for the peaceful environs of the River Welland.

The riverside walk took me past some grand Georgian houses and Dutch-style architecture, leading me to another pub about 10-minutes walk from the town centre.

The Moorings (123 Commercial Rd, Spalding PE11 2HD)
This one-time coal wharf used to be a boat hire centre from the late nineteenth century before being converted to a pub in the 1980's.
You get checked carpet, sofas and armchair and Notts County v Leicester City in the front room, the casual bit, then dining tables to the rear and side.
Fullers 'London Pride' or Timothy Taylor 'Golden Ale' on the bar.
Lots of cheery luncheon trade.

I  took my beer out onto the two-level decking at the rear of the pub, where the floating algae on the water beside me made it feel like we were moving on a boat and made me a little queasy.  Or perhaps that was the Golden Ale.  Not on the best of form.

🕝Two-thirty - time to head to Spalding United's Sir Halley Stewart Field and join the throngs at the turnstiles.

Spalding United were promoted via the play-offs from the Southern League last season.
They've spent a fair bit of money improving facilities during their rise to this level, including the installation of a smart 3G pitch.

The club bar served a cask Batemans 'XB', the converted shipping container served cheesy chips, and picnic tables provided a spot to sit in the afternoon sunshine awaiting kick-off.
Dropkick Murphy's, AC/DC and Guns 'n' Roses made up a rock soundtrack on the tannoy system.  Then someone gave a speech about this being the first game Spalding had hosted at this level of the football pyramid.
A bit like Tom Cruise before the World Cup final, but better.

I'd love to provide all the details of Tyrone Marsh's goal for Oxford on the 40th minute and the controversy surrounding it.  But that was the exact moment that I picked to pop to the loo.
Oxford City don't have enough travelling fans to provide a roar which can be heard in the gents, so I had no idea we'd gone 1-0 up until glancing at the scoreboard a few minutes later.

Spalding had enjoyed the lion's share of the ball during the first half and looked threatening, so it was tough on them to be behind at half time.

The second half was a bit more even, both sides creating some good chances, leading to an exciting finish and a few nerve-wracking moments for City when the ball bounced around the box and could have gone anywhere.
Not as exciting as seeing Britt Assombolonga come on for Harborough Town a few days later in a Tuesday night home fixture for Oxford, though.

Good luck to Spalding for the rest of the season.
The town had made for a top lower league away day - sunshine, Bass and tulips...what more can I ask for? 

Coventry Part 2 - Bass, Batches and (Sky) Blues

A second post from sunny Coventry on the Beer & Pubs Forum big day out. 
We'd done the historic inns with wooden beams.  We'd drank Bass and been non-members in the members club.
Next up was a micro, followed by a walk out to a trio of pubs in Chapelfields.

There were also rumours that a rogue visit to the Sky Blue Tavern was on the cards.
Something that seemed a good idea, with it being eleven days until Coventry City would return to Premier League football - easing in with a gentle start away at Arsenal.

So here's how the rest of the rest of the day panned out...

Hops D'Amour (67 Corporation Street, Coventry, CV1 1GX)
This city centre micro opened in an old Singer's Sewing Machine store in 2021 and didn't take long to start picking up awards.  It's a single rectangular room; lots of light wood; lots of pictures filling the walls; sensible seating where your feet touch the floor.
A signed picture of London blues-rockers Dogs D'Amour confirmed my suspicions as to where the pub name had come from.

More micros named after late '80s hairy rock bands, please.  Surely there's a Motley Brew somewhere?

Hops D'Amour had lots of tempting options on both cask and keg...but who needs other options when you've got a chocolate brownie stout called 'Caked'.

This 5% sweet dark beer was brewed in Galgate, Lancashire by Lune Brew and proved to be a marvellous pick.
It may not be everyone's cup of tea after the trad surrounds of the Windmill, but I was pleased to revisit this friendly micro where the chap at the next table wasted no time in striking up a conversation with us.

We had the longest walk of the day ahead, back down Spon Street, through the underpass and into the western suburbs.
No-one stopped for Moira's wet fish.

Marching on through the residential streets to reach the hanging baskets and parasols of the Hearsall Inn.

Hearsall Inn (45 Craven Street, Coventry, CV5 8DS)
This is a cracking family-owned backstreet pub, the decorations and Tuesday evening music sessions a homage to the landlord's Irish roots.
You get flags on the ceiling, Guinness mirrors, pictures, toucans...TVs offering horse racing or summer footy transfer news and a good crowd of folk for a Wednesday afternoon.

Cask beers available were Tring 'Doctor ABC', Church End 'Goats Milk', or Bass.
A second Bass of the day for me here - on good form and going down a treat.

We joined Stafford Paul, who'd spent his time whilst we in the Fairfax Club and micro taking a leisurely stroll to the Hearsall, bagging the best table and the pork scratchings.

The soundtrack was Patrick Hernandez and Billy Ocean from the TV in the corner tuned into Now 70s Hits 76-79.

Changing into 101 Best Disco Ever, which would require me to stay until around 10pm to hear number one.  That would mean missing the recent addition to the Black Country Ales empire, and - perhaps more importantly - the train home.
So onward we walked, the Nursery Tavern less than 5-minutes around the corner...

Nursery Tavern (38-39 Lord Street, Coventry, CV5 8DA)
I have been to this mid-terrace Victorian pub previously, but it's changed a lot since I was last here.  Black Country Ales have installed some chequered cushioned bench seating, busy wallpaper, patterned carpets and TV screens listing the beers, which will come as no surprise.

The bar counter has moved creating an open-plan layout, although it's a pokey place with distinct different seating areas.
And an extensive cask choice...

I opted for the Fixed Wheel session IPA 'Through and Off', priced at £4.40 a pint.  In decent condition, light and easy to drink.
Looks like they've got the usual cobs on offer too - Burts crisps 'in' rather than at the side as controversial as whether these are cobs or batches when served in a Black Country Ales pub in Cov.

Mrs PropUptheBar wants to know where the shorts and T-shirt are.
"Didn't he look at the weather forecast?!"

Just one more pub on the original plan - a short hop to a bit of a classic...

Broomfield Tavern (14-16 Broomfield Place, Coventry, CV5 6GY)
The Broomfield is wonderfully ramshackle - a lovely pub which looks like it hasn't changed in years.  It dates back to the mid 1800's when the city was rapidly expanding and the pub would have refreshed the workers from the new factories that boomed in this area.

On cask were four locals from Froth Blowers, Church End and A'J's, plus the Wiltshire interloper.

A Froth Blowers 'Riverside Stout' for me.
And whatever he's having...

The Broomfield offered proper snacks - good value rolls and pickled eggs.

A contender for my favourite pub of the day, although there were a few that we visited worthy of that title.
I've no idea if there was great background music or if we were debating the hot topics of the day in this pub.  I think I was too busy taking pictures of that dog.

We couldn't depart Coventry with just one curveball on our route. I think it was always a given that we were heading into the footy-themed Sky Blue Tavern on the way back to the station.

Sky Blue Tavern (Hertford Place, Coventry, CV1 3JZ)
There was once a Sky Blue Tavern on the corner of Thackall Street and Swan Lane - the football club renaming the former M&B Mercers Arms when they acquired it in 1994.  That's now long demolished and this version, looking out onto the dual carriageway ring-road, is less traditional.
It was opened by the local Dhillon's Brewery in June 2021. 

Somehow, I don't think Stafford Paul is going to be kicking himself that he'd left earlier to catch a train and missed this one.

It's keg only, with the most interesting beers being the Dhillon's 'Sky Blue Army' and 'Ghost Town Lager'.
Ghost Town for me...veering towards Coventry's music heritage rather than the football theme.

In this spacious bar you get table football, big screens, games machines, blokes in hi-vis, and a desi menu.
I'm a bit puzzled by the location - outside the centre in the opposite direction to the ground, but good luck to them.  And good luck to the Sky Blues in the Prem (except for two particular matches against East Midlands opposition).

My hapless thrashing at table football meant I had to hang my head in shame and declare it time to go home.
Great to see everyone - look forward to doing it all again in another location soon.  Probably in pouring rain.