The Prince of Wales, Wimbledon, SW19

This is a rather grand looking Victorian pub with a prime location opposite Wimbledon train station and the large Centre Court shopping mall. The pub looks fantastic on approach thanks to a wonderful glazed tile façade, but sadly this is just about all you will find of historical interest, as the interior has been chopped and changed endlessly over the years and now looks much like any other Taylor Walker outlet. The front part of the pub houses the main bar, with the servery all the way over on the right hand wall. There is a fair bit of seating between the bar and the entrance, mainly under the front windows and in a complex of partitioned areas to the left, all broken up by a series of short walls and pillars. The room is bare boarded and has been decorated with red lincrusta wallpaper, which works quite well alongside some of the dark wood features such as the servery. The pub extends a surprising distance to the rear, passing the bar and emerging into an angular space with lots of good dark wood panelling, bookshelf-effect wallpaper and several large mirrors. There is a slightly raised carpeted section at the far end with good seating options, whilst the main bulk of the space has standard tables and chairs plus a few high stools along ledges. There are lots of TV screens throughout the pub, all showing either live cricket or football to a keen crowd of southern hemisphere ex-pats. One wall to the rear had a modest collection of Wimbledon FC memorabilia including the 1988 FA Cup and Charity Shield programmes, a couple of signed shirts and some photos of memorable moments in the club's history. This being a Wimbledon pub, there were also the obligatory tennis themed bits, mainly in the shape of old photos from the famous tournament. The ale range was better than I'd expected, with Sambrooks Scrumdown, Greene King London Glory, Truman's Scorcher, Taylor Walker 1730 and Hammerton Life on Mars all available. I had a pint of the latter which was in very good nick and went down far too quickly. A standard Taylor Walker pub grub menu was available and the food coming out of the kitchen looked passable to me. I'd been past the pub hundreds of times but never bothered to venture inside, assuming it would be a poor station bar, but I was actually pretty impressed. It won't be to everyone's liking thanks to the dominance of sports and the overtly male customer base this attracts, but I thought it was a notch above the average TW outlet and that the rear of the pub makes a nice spot to enjoy one of their well kept beers.

If you like busy, noisy, warm pubs showing football this is for you and me.Nice interior but too many high tables and stools.Decent selection of regional beers like Tribute and Hooky but my London Fields -Hackney Hopster was as usual a pretty good beer.

They wanted to charge £4.40 tonight for 3.8% Hophead!!! errm, no thanks! I will never set foot in here again!

Originally, so its website says, a 17th century coaching in, this externally grand pub has long resembled a Victorian gin palace and with sympathetic ownership could be a classic of the genre. Not much chance of that with Punch Taverns, who have lately inflicted their Taylor Walker branding on it, so it's much the same as all their others in London. It's a perfectly safe choice for a couple of hours but it could be so much better.