Battersea and Wandsworth Pub Crawl

A sunny weekend trip to the capital, in which we venture south of the river and find ourselves in breweries in railway arches alongside some real pubs in Battersea and Wandsworth.

After a long coach journey into London we set off on foot from Victoria to Chelsea Bridge, then across to the Battersea Power Station development.

When I lived in London you could get nowhere near the crumbling remains of Battersea Power Station, the Thames Path diverting you around hoardings which hid a site that nobody quite knew what to do with.
The building was constructed in two phases starting in 1929 and competed in 1955.
At one point it was generating a fifth of the capitals electricity, although in a list of achievements keeping the lights on in the House of Commons is secondary to featuring on the cover of Pink Floyd's 1977 LP 'Animals'.

Many years of head scratching as to what to with the listed building followed its closure in 1983.  Theme parks and a home for Chelsea FC were suggested at various points, although in the end luxury London living is the route they've gone down.
Yours from just £881,000, but you won't want to be messing around with pocket change and will probably just go straight in for the 6-bed, 7-bath, 11th floor apartment at £18 million.
And for that much money you get a brewery tap next door...

Battersea Brewery Tap Room (12-14 Arches Lane, Battersea, SW11 8AB - web)
The railway bridge running alongside the development provides the venue for food and drink outlets and an intriguing small cinema.  And for Battersea Brewery, which opened here in 2018.  As the bar occupies one arch and the brewery another, it's not your typical industrial estate tap room, and feels like quite a smart venue.

There's a run of varied and adventurous keg beers plus two handpumps with everything priced in pint, schooner or half pint measures.  Is a schooner the cool measure to have your mild in now?
I wanted the home-brewed cask ale, but this sputtered out the tap and ran out before filling the dimpled mug.  Not fancying the rugby-themed Hogs Back brew, I had to stick with the Battersea keg, with a respectable stout and a half of the decadent, uber-malty 8.5% scotch ale.

Most of tables were reserved for England later, but the bar was pretty busy for the first Six Nations fixture of the day.  It did take me a while to get served, but I had some sympathy for the staff, pouring the beers and keeping a toasted sandwich production line going.

It was a Six Nations day, which meant the rugby dominated many of the places we visited.  The first match of the day hadn't started in the Battersea Tap Room, but they still felt the need to have the volume on the TV to be turned up to the deafeningly-loud end of the scale to listen to the pre-match build-up.

We moved on to the nearby Mason's Arms pub, although it was frustratingly further than it should have been due to all the closed routes around the new housing developments.
You can't park your car in front of London pubs on busy roads, but there are other ways to scupper the photographic ambitions of pub bloggers...

Mason's Arms (169 Battersea Park Road, Battersea, SW8 4BT - web)
This Fuller's pub has had a refurbishment in 2019, stripping it back to basics with an open-plan layout.  Nice chunky pillars holding the ceiling up and nice floor tiling around the bar. 

Being Fuller's, the cask choice was a familiar 'London Pride', 'ESB' and Dark Star 'Hophead' selection.  But the Hophead was the best beer of the day, perfectly served and eminently drinkable.
That said, I do wish I'd spent a bit more time perusing Tom's Beer Board which listed an impressive choice of craft beers.

Well-fed with Mason's burgers 'n' chips, we made a walk southbound toward Wandsworth Road overground station, with (yet another) brewery tap the target.

Distortion Brewery Tap (647 Portslade Road, Battersea, SW8 3DH - web)
Back in the railway arches again.
This is a relatively new brewery, a little off the beaten track, which was most probably why it was much quieter than anywhere else we'd been.
The bar counter stretches part-way across the middle of the arch, basked in sunshine which was thoroughly dazzling and annoying the staff.  It's a tank bar, with beers being served from the six shiny vessels behind the bar, each with a snazzy electronic display screen.

Distortion gets the usual extra marks for having beer mats.  Immediately deducted for only using them to sit water bottles on and offering them for sale as merchandise along with their t-shirts and tote bags.
It is just possible that I may have stolen the one from our table that the water bottle was sitting on.  Expect that in a small segment of Crimewatch.

We decided to travel a little further for our next destination, hopping aboard a bus to take us down Wandsworth Road.  We were making our way to the one-time site of Young's Brewery and their old brewery tap.

Ram Inn (68 Wandsworth Hight Street, Wandsworth, SW18 4LB - web)
Well, it's pretty impressive isn't it?  Three layered floors stretching around the corner of the road, with a fine chimney taking pride of place above the Ram Pub Co logo.  Behind it are the remaining buildings from Young's Brewery which operated until a move to Bedford in 2006.

When the brewery shut, so did the pub, not re-opening until 2019.
It's home to the Sly Beast microbrewery and as I'm always drawn to shiny brewing kit, we sat by the internal window which looks onto the brew room.

We were perched on some dreadful white leather high stools that seemed out of place, although, according to WhatPub, Punch have taken over the freehold and plan to evict the brewery and jazz the Ram up into more of a nightclub venue.

On cask was a Slybeast 'Beam Engine Bitter' or '4ft2' stout, with kegs serving up SlyBeast lager, IPA and specials.
My bitter was...so-so. Sorry.

Pretty much next-door neighbours of the Ram is Sambrook's Brewery.  They were one of the first of the 21st century wave of small brewers in the capital, originally operating out of an industrial estate until recently relocating into part of the historic Young's site.

Sambrook's Brewery Tap (40 Ram Street, Wandsworth, SW18 1UD - web)
As made blatantly obvious in this post, I'm not a fan of the Six Nations in pubs.  Here there were two floors, packed to the rafters, standing room hard to come by, all attention directed to England on the big screen.  I squeezed in to the bar, made the foolhardy choice of the Imperial Stout, then escaped with it to the peace and quiet of the courtyard.

I suspect I would have been won over by Sambrook's had we actually been able to get in.  Four of their beers on cask alongside the kegs and good looking pizza, in a swanky modern set-up within the historic buildings. 

There was just time to fit in one more pub visit before heading homeward...

Old Sergeant (104 Garratt Lane, Wandsworth, SW18 4DJ)
We arrived here just after the rugby had finished, into a pub full of raucous drunken souls and the occasional bit of bizarre fancy dress. All in all, a chaotic mess.

The Ram Pub Co look after the Old Sergeant, so it was the Slybeast bitter as the sole cask on offer when we visited.  Looking for a change I went for the same breweries' 'Swamp Donkey' keg IPA, which was a decent tipple.

And with that we bade south west London farewell.
A varied bunch of places; beers middling to great; no bargains; much grumpiness about the Six Nations taking over the pubs, and much undocumented grumpiness and frustration about London buses and traffic.