The Town House, St. Annes Town Centre, Lytham St. Annes

Official site of The Town House - www.greeneking.co.uk

Official site of The Town House - www.greeneking.co.uk

Downstairs is now completely locked up to the public, the beautiful bar intact but basically being used as a storage room. Upstairs is a total hellhole of a Greene King pub, like something you’d find in Benidorm, a soulless open plan mess with feral kids running around in every direction. IPA on the bar along with a Lilleys bee sting Perry, but every customer was drinking standard keg or soft drinks. With Greene King’s shameful neglect of the beautiful bar, I cannot give anything higher than a 1, and the pub itself doesn’t warrant anything higher.

Big open pub that over looks the station ok sort of place selling pub chain food what you see is what you get nice seating area outside

I was genuinely excited as I made my way through St Annes to visit this pub, which contains what CAMRA describe as 'quite simply one of the greatest pub rooms in Britain'. The Town House is actually a relatively new pub, built in 1985 (and originally called 'The Crescent') on the site of the former St Annes Hotel, but crucially incorporating the hotel's spectacular basement bar - a glorious bit of extravagance with beautiful tiling throughout including a magnificent ceramic bar and dazzling mosaic floor. This was to be the crowning glory of my weekend on the Fylde peninsula, but in their infinite wisdom, Greene King, who run the Town House, have decided to only open this bar to the public on Saturday evenings. I therefore had to make do with trying to catch a glimpse through the windows before retreating to the modern part of the pub for a wholly unsatisfying visit. The part of the pub that you can readily access is a grim Meet and Eat branded boozer that seems to attract the town's low-life and has virtually nothing of interest within it. You enter into a huge room with a carpeted semi circular front seating area giving views out across the town and to the neighbouring train station. It's a raised space, filled with standard tables and chairs and it sweeps round the rear wall, eventually running opposite the bar which is to your left on entering. A banister separates this area from some high tables and stools directly opposite the servery in a bare boarded area. The servery space has a chequerboard tile floor which pales in comparison to the splendour hidden away in the room below. Walls are painted in neutral colours except for one which has been covered with floral wallpaper. The room then extends further back past the bar into a mostly empty space with a couple of pool tables, dartboard and various slot machines. Seating is almost non existent here apart from some chairs for the pool players to rest on. There are plenty of TV screens throughout the pub, all of which were showing a football fixture, seemingly at the request of a bunch of fans of one of the teams involved, who were creating quite a racket at one end of the room. One redeeming feature is the decent amount of outdoor seating which would be quite pleasant in good weather. The pub is also quite good for people watching as you can easily spy on the dregs of society as they shamble around the room. I wasn't best impressed with my visit thus far and things got no better at the bar. A couple of pumps had Greene King IPA clips on them, but neither were actually in operation as they hadn't had time to get the casks on that morning. One young lad offered to do this, but the barmaid pointed out that he'd only be trained to change kegs, so I'd have to pick something else. I thought the keg Ruddles Best couldn't be any worse than the John Smiths Smooth, so I gave that a go and spent the next 30 minutes wishing I'd just walked out. Plenty of people were eating from the cheap Greene King menu which I would've done had I not hated the pub so much. This was a classic case of great expectations leading to a massive let-down. As I sat there, I wondered what this pub would be like if it were run by Nicholson's or Sam Smiths, and this made me even more depressed, so I sank the last of my horrible pint and left. There is a great bit of British pub heritage here, but I, like most other visitors, was unable to appreciate it. Greene King should hang their heads in shame.