The Station Master, Marylebone, NW1

Visited 02/02/26. Visited previously as Sports Bar & Grill on 23/06/21. No cask. Keg offering of Heineken and the AF version, Inch's and berries & cherries Old Mount Cider, Peroni, Moretti, Amstel, Wingman, Guinness, Camden Hells, Asahi, Jubel Peach lager, Neck Oil. Sport orientated station pub. Bare boarded apart from a ceramic tile skirt just inside the entrance on the immediate right-hand wall. Tall tables and tall backed stools in two rows from the entrance on the left-hand side opposite the bar counter. Beyond the end of the bar counter, the venue opens out into a larger high-ceilinged room with regular tables and chairs in the middle and then some booth tables down the left- and right-hand sides. Given a sports bar there are a lot of screens showing sports (OK all tuned into Sky Sports News on my visit absent any actual live sport and so given that, the sound wasn't sport commentary rather non-descript music). Lighting here pleasant, via a variety of suspended bulbs! There is a downstairs bar, quite expansive with its own counter serving the same drinks as the bar upstairs. Plenty of seating, lots of large screens and also a pool table and dart board. Better pubs around here but not bad for a station venue and a small uptick on previous incarnation and so will defo attract punters for live sport.

Official site of The Station Master - www.socialpubandkitchen.co.uk

Official site of The Station Master - www.socialpubandkitchen.co.uk

Part of the Stonegate empire, this place came into existence around 2009 as part of Marylebone station. Quite unsurprisingly, this was a first visit last night, made under duress owing to a friend who’s easy to please. The concourse entrance is decked out like a sports stadium, which may have had a megavision screen. Otherwise, the interior is as previously described, very industrial with a pale wood floor (which bounced), exposed (probably Victorian) girders painted bright orange, exposed air handling and partly bare brick walls; there are life-size portrayals of sporting activities to walls, lest someone mistake the place for The Wenlock; otherwise, décor comprised Six Nations flags and an enormous inflatable set of Guinness rugby goalposts to an entrance. Furniture is tubular steel with orange or blue vinyl upholstery, then some slightly raised booth-style seats, each with its own TV and on the subject of TVs, I counted 21, not including ones that may be in the basement pool area or function room, seemingly showing every single sporting fixture taking place on the planet at the time of my visit, each with commentary and competing with the awful piped McDonald’s-style soundtrack, the whole cacophony repeatedly triggering the 80 db noise alert on my smartwatch, conversation being nigh on impossible; there are several games machines too, all amounting to sensory overload. As far as the customers go, I did spot a woman, but otherwise it’s a 99.9% younger male venue. There was real ale of sorts, in the predictable form of Doom and Pride, a half not requested but arrived courtesy of the aforementioned ‘friend’; I sipped a little, before surreptitiously hiding the glass behind one of the laminated menus that litter the tables and on the subject of food, it was a task not to wretch given the appalling stench of fried chicken. Pure drinking hell.