Rose & Crown, SW17

Visited 27/08/24 Traditional pub, well described below. Bar faces you as you enter on either side. Well-staffed and attentive and easy-going bar staff. Some TV's dotted around but all switched off during my visit but advertising upcoming live sport (mainly footy). Bare boarded (the boards have certainly seen some use) and traditional wooden furniture. Pretty expansive with the left-hand side of the bar much larger in terms of seating and a small area in the front in the windows looking out onto an unexciting main road! Cask just Sambrook's Wandle. Loads of decent keg options, I noted Siren Lumina, Drop Project Flow APA, Mondo Little Victories, Sambrook’s Lazarus, a nitro stout, Squeezer, a juicy pale ale from By the Horns, a house pale ale brewed for them by Moor, as well as more regular choices such as Gamma Ray, Budweiser, Jubel peach lager, Cruz, Guinness, Brixton Reliance Pale Ale, Signature Brew Backstage lager, Inch's cider, Stiegl Helles and Lucky Saint. Plenty of bottle and can options, including a couple of fridges for take-aways also. Was pretty busy on my visit but very pleasant. Quite a bit of outside seating around the perimeter of the pub, popular in the early evening sunshine. Decent venue where extensive beer choice added to an otherwise traditional (and quite tired looking) pub. Another couple of cask options would have nudged score up further.

I don’t know the history of this pub, but I reckon it’s an interwar years’ construction. With an AFC Wimbledon affiliation, there’s a boarded floor with tiled bar apron, grey wainscoting with white walls to an egg yolk yellow Anaglypta ceiling; furniture is old school stuff. Of interest are leaded glass partitions with stained glass rose depictions, all looking a bit Art Nouveau, thereafter little in the way of décor apart from hanging multi-coloured frilly plastic things which looked like pairs of knickers. There’s silent multi-TV showing unwatched sport, then quite loudish music, enjoyed by a mixed local crowd, though few compared to neighbouring pubs on my Sunday evening visit. There was just one solitary cask here, Twickenham’s The Light, £2.75 a half and just about ok – I’d have not said the same if presented with a whole pint – served by an attentive barman. There’s a decent pub lurking somewhere in here; ditching the TVs, frilly knickers and getting in a wider and more imaginative cask lineup would raise the score a fair bit.

Official site of Rose & Crown - www.frontierpubs.co.uk

Official site of Rose & Crown - www.frontierpubs.co.uk