The Hand & Shears, EC1

Official site of The Hand & Shears - thehandandshears.com

Official site of The Hand & Shears - thehandandshears.com

You may think that, on a hot summer evening, the pubs in Central London are packed out, with a big crowd out on the street. Venture inside, however, and you'll likely find plenty of seats, as I did in The Hand And Shears. Though it's easy to understand the preference to get away from the even warmer interior. Anyway, the bar offers up several Guinness taps and at least 3 Landlord pumps. Portobello Westway Pale completed the limited cask offering, with Neck Oil as exciting as the kegs got. Another one of those "it's alright" kind of pubs which you so often find in Central London.

One of Camra's heritage pub interiors, and welcome for that as much as anything. So it's a bonus to find pretty decent Bass on one of the three hand pumps (Hobgoblin and Landlord the others). This was a stonewall NBSS 3.5, but I gave it a 4 as I was on the rebound from a dreadful Sam Smith's OBB nearby. I was the third or fourth person through the door, but they knock off early in the powerhouse of the British economy, and by 4:03pm it was full of successful entrepreneurs and the booze was flowing. It was only two hours since I'd finished my lunch, but I'm just supporting pubs, not the whole economy.

Still unchanged from my first visit over twenty years ago, definitely the archetypal traditional pub.The beers don't seem to change too much either, on this visit there was Courage Best, Black Sheep Bitter, Youngs Original and Timothy Taylor Landlord, not my particular beer scene but a must visit pub nontheless.