The Royal Standard, Croydon

Facebook page of The Royal Standard - www.facebook.com

Facebook page of The Royal Standard - www.facebook.com

Backstreet pub that was the best of the 3 Fuller's pubs we tried in the Croydon area. With a corner location, the room and bar are L-shaped and have a cosy feel. With 3pm opening times during the week, we were the first customers of the day. The barmaid was friendly and she was accompanied by the 9-month-old pub cat, who was also extremely friendly and clearly well fed! London Pride, ESB & HSB are the regular beers. Guests came by way of Hophead & Boltmaker, which made it a much better beer range than I had anticipated. A friendly locals' pub with a warm feel to it.

A traditional backstreet Fullers pub, Multi roomed inside with eight handles on the bar most in use with Fullers related beers including a rather excellent pint of Dark Star Revelation. Given its location I would say this is almost exclusively a locals pub aside from the odd, occasional pub ticker. A quite decent pub.

Great little pub that’s ended up in a poor location with an ncp car park and the flyover adjacent to the pub. Nice characterful wooden interior serving the usual Fuller’s selection. Wish it was in a better location but well worth making the effort to visit.

This is a cracking little pub - shame it's overshadowed by a multi-storey car park and the Croydon flyover. Thankfully it's not changed since the previous reviewer's visit. Entering by a door on the right you're in a very basic bar; bare-boarded, no tables or chairs, just hard wooden stools at ledges by the window. The handpumps in here were double clipped so you knew what was available in the other bar without having to do the full circuit before ordering. It's good to see that, and I don't know why more pubs don't do it. The ales on were the usual Fuller's offerings of London Pride, Chiswick; HSB and ESB (£1.95 a half), as well as a guest ale of Elgood's Black Dog. This is a good selection. Many much larger and more prominent Fuller's pubs don't do anywhere near as well. There was no sign of any menus, but the tray of rolls was at the end of the bar counter. Around to the left of this bar brings you into a small carpeted room with just two or three tables and chairs, which in turn leads into a couple of snugs at the back. The furnishings in these snugs is pretty traditional, but with one including a very ancient solid wooden pew with folding seats. The multi-room format makes it sound quite big, but it's really quite small - snug even. There are a couple of nice old brewery (Fuller's Smith and Turner of course) and distillery mirrors. This is a really nice old backstreet boozer. Let's hope it survives. Perhaps being under the flyover helps, as it presumably wouldn't be everybody's first choice of a location for residential development.