The White Hart Hotel, New Cross, SE14

Official site of The White Hart Hotel - www.whitehartse14.com

Official site of The White Hart Hotel - www.whitehartse14.com

This is a large and rather impressive looking corner pub on the main road between New Cross and Peckham. You enter into a spacious bare boarded V-shaped room with a grand servery in a similar shape running from the right. The bar has a chunky dark wood counter, decoratively topped support pillars holding a gantry and an attractive etched glass bar back. As a hint to their beer range, the servery was decorated with bunting made from old craft beer cans, which was quite an effective look. Chairs and low stools provide suitably comfortable seating options around all sides of the pub in what is a fairly spacious room. Decor includes a few beer related items, some technical drawings of an unspecified nature and some great arty bits including a poster displaying different examples of graphic design which I spent much of my visit studying. There are also lots of posters for live music everywhere and as you pass the left hand end of the bar, you reach a lower rear space with a stage on the back wall. Board games are stacked on top of one of the fireplaces and a good selection of music was initially playing when I arrived although it eventually stopped, so maybe there is a juke box here somewhere? Food is available with mains ranging from £10-14 but no one was eating on my midweek evening visit. Two hand pumps offered Red Willow Effortless and a real cider but the pub also has its own microbrewery and one of their beers was on keg - PWA White Hart Session IPA - so I gave that a try instead. It turned out to be fairly underwhelming and really cold, so I didn't really enjoy it all that much. The brewery doesn't seem to be that well promoted - I really had to look hard to find their beer on the bar and a few weeks later I was chatting to someone who works for one of London's biggest breweries and when he told me this was his local, I mentioned the PWA brewery and he had no idea it existed! I thought this was a pretty decent pub that will probably do well pushing craft beer in this increasingly gentrified area, but doesn't offer too much for the cask ale drinker. It's a grand old landmark pub but has been knocked about quite a bit, so the character is diluted somewhat, but I would still be happy enough to return for a pint or two, if not for a full session.

Big ,corner pub with opened out interior.Quite sparten with bare boarded flooring and mismatched tables and chairs.Area to the rear for live music. Big wonky shaped bar.Own PWA brewery in the basement and the one beer on was stunning.About 16 other keg beers from the best of British brewers.Absolutely stunned by the line up of beers.

There were two handpumps on the bar counter, one with a Young's Bitter clip reversed, and the other unclipped, leaving the rarely seen (thank goodness) keg Bombardier (overpriced at £1.40 a half) as the only bitter available. This drink qualified as one of the worst beers I have ever drunk (or more accurately attempted to drink), and I can remember Red Barrel! There are a couple of separate rooms inside. The first room as you enter is carpeted, has a mix of lilac and purple painted walls (!), has plastic upholstered banquettes, silver painted metal framed tables, and a few standard chairs. Through a pair of doors on the left takes you into another room that struck me as being a little more upmarket than the front room for some reason. There's some more space of some kind at the back of this room, but as it was in darkness I couldn't really see what it was used for. I spotted something of an African theme in this pub - some wood carvings of giraffes and elephants in the front room, plus a Tutankhamun inspired mummy casing in the back room. All rather unusual, but somehow approriate I suppose as the ancient Egyptians were the first to brew beer. It seems that the "hotel" in the name isn't a throwback, as a couple of overseas visitors (French I think) spent a trying 10 minutes attempting to book in before being sent away to get some Sterling as cash seemed to be the only method of payment and the manager(?) didn't fancy taking Euros. I had left before they returned so didn't see the end of the story. This was quite an unusual pub to visit. Young's Bitter isn't the best beer in the world, but it was a shame it wasn't available as it would have been a quantum improvement on the keg Bombardier. I don't expect to return.