Sherlock Holmes, Charing Cross, WC2

Trekked here on the way home as my recording couldn’t verify I had been here since I started tracking pubs on PG. definitely the only one here potentially previously unvisited in the post code. Was pretty effing manic when I got here about 9.30pm. Plenty of beers on handpump (Abbot, Tribute, GK IPA) but the instant I walked in the door I thought a glass of red wine is safer here. No idea what the red wine was, asked for the wine list and was told there was a single red so chose that!! There were some ales on hand pump that sounded like they were made up names to sell to tourists. As I said I had always assumed I had been here but maybe that was my sub-conscious telling me that was the case to protect me. Anyway job done, never to be repeated.

Last visited around 20 years ago, this was formerly the Northumberland Arms, rebranded by Whitbread as a Sherlock Holmes-themed pub in 1957; the place apparently appears in one of Conan Doyle’s novels and supposedly contains elements from the [Ideal?] Holmes’ exhibition, salvaged from the Festival of Britain, 1951. Arriving on a Monday mid-evening, the pub was unsurprisingly rammed with tourists, looking for the Ye Merry Olde London experience. I’ve been in busier pubs and the crowds here should come as no surprise to the staff, but there was absolute paralysis, staff standing there like rabbits caught in the headlights of a car. After about five minutes, I saw red (A Study in Scarlet?) and went to the vastly superior Ship & Shovel next door; this place acts like a forcefield to keep the tourists away from it. I returned 20 minutes later and there was a relative calm, with glasses and plates of partially eaten food on tables, chips all over the floor, one trodden on by a woman, who slipped and narrowly avoided a nasty accident. The furniture is tatty, my studded banquette cracked and leaking stuffing, though otherwise there are typical Greene King nods, the only difference is a TV ‘beer board’. Décor is Holmesian, with a toy dog’s head in a wall mounted, glass fronted box, I suppose a reference to the Hound of the Baskervilles. Ales: two Lilley’s ciders, Abbot, GK IPA, Sherlock Holmes House Ale (Morland) and Windsor & Eton’s Father Thames at £2.70 a half, tasting like it was sourced from the nearby said river, soapy and grim. This has to be one of the worst pubs in central London; less Conan Doyle, more Conan the Barbarian.