Princess Victoria, Shepherds Bush, W12

This place dates from 1829, but it wasn’t a gin palace then, as this incarnation came along in 1880. PSM pretty well nails it with his review and he’s right in that virtually no trace of this pub’s former grandeur remains, apart from perhaps the marble bar top. Otherwise, elements of note are the herringbone floor, sweeping leather banquette beneath the main picture window, marble fireplace, polygonal lantern and deep field panelled bar front. What’s not so good is the prevalence of black paint to the ceiling, some walls and woodwork. Customers were young professional types; this place is about as far removed as you can get from the Askew up the road. What was absent from the Askew was the dog barking loudly, greatly detracting from my enjoyment of the place, not helped by a TV showing Sky News, albeit with the sound off, irritating none the less. Ales amounted to two unused pumps, a Landlord clip reversed, then the inferior Boltmaker at £2.45 a half, served by an aloof barmaid. This isn’t a bad place – actually it’s the best of a bad bunch along Uxbridge Road, but the barking dog and irritating TV are for me disincentives to making a return visit; the ale line-up isn’t great either.

This is a large corner pub on the busy Uxbridge Road between Acton and Shepherd’s Bush. A corner entrance takes you into a dramatically opened out main bar area, with the servery over to the left now describing a long reverse C-shape, which would presumably have passed through several rooms but now juts out into a spacious single open-plan space. The bar has an attractive dark wood counter front and a few vestiges of the former bar back, but much of the serving area is simply empty due to the loss of the various bits of partitioning that have now been removed. The room has some nice patterned wooden flooring, plain painted walls plus a full panelled dark wood section to the rear and some large windows along the front wall. Button backed banquettes run along the front and right-hand walls, supported by typical pub chairs, kore of which can be found to the rear. The walls have been decorated with a great many mixed paintings from various eras, with a bit of a bird theme to many of them. There was also a TV screen at the front of the room which remained off during my stay, and a pleasant fireplace to the rear, with a mirror in a decorative gold frame above. A small skylit cupola can be found near here, next to some mighty kudu antlers which are mounted to one side. A large doorway at the back of the room leads through to a dining room with formal rows of tables and chairs in a darker looking room with another nice fireplace and an open kitchen to the rear. There appears to be another room (the 1829 Room) upstairs, plus accommodation, but I didn’t check any of this out, nor the courtyard garden to the rear. I did manage to catch the nice cobbled seating area to the front of the pub though, which is partly positioned on a former tram platform. A chilled soundtrack played in the background over the course of my visit, but this quickly got lost under the general hubbub created by a busy room devoid of soft furnishings. There are four handpulls on the bar but three of these were unused whilst the fourth had a turned Landlord clip, so for the third pub in succession, I was left to pick something from the expensive keg range, finally settling on a pint of Brixton Reliance for £5.90. The bar staff were pretty slow but seemed friendly enough and there was a nice general ambiance in the pub, with people coming and going constantly, including a family with young children who turned up and got served at 8:15, to my surprise. It’s a shame that this place, reputedly once a fine Victorian gin palace, has been knocked about so much that it betrays little of its former glory. It is still a pretty decent pub though, in an area that doesn’t have a great deal going for it pub-wise, and I quite enjoyed my time here, even if there was no cask ale available.