The Dog House, SE11

The Dog House is a large looking pub that is on opposite corner to the Tommyfield pub. Once inside the main room is a decent size with the seating being mainly normal tables and chairs,the floor is bare boards painted black,for some strange reason the bar front was carpeted,there is also a small seperate room to the front right which also had normal tables and chairs. There was some funky modern background music playing during my dinnertime visit. There were four real ales on the bar,i had a drink of Bombardier Gold which was a very nice drink,the other beers were Portobello Star,Doom Bar and London Pride. There is an outside seating area to the front of the pub which was strangly surrounded by hay bales. I was quite happy drinking in this pub. Pub visited 2/8/2014

There has been a change of management chain since the last reviews and the new lot seem to be running it as a better pub than before when comparing the previous reviews to my experience. It was originally called The Roebuck before being changed to The Charlie Chaplin in recognition of the fact that it was one of the local pubs Charlie’s dad used to regularly get blotto in when they lived a few doors down Kennington road. Despite a further name change to its current one this Charlie Chaplin connection is still remembered with internal pictures and a statue of the wee comic genius. These add to the still quirky interior which seems to be basically unchanged by the new ownership from before And although unfortunately this still means the carpeted sections on the central bar are in place, it is certainly a preferable pub interior and a place of character compared to the Tommyfield across the junction. But one important improvement that the new ownership has made is to improve the beer options and there are now six handpumps on the far side of the central bar as you enter from the front. Although these were mainly the fairly standard offerings of Black Sheep, London Pride, Doombar and CW Bombadier, we experienced decent pints of Harveys Sussex Best and Portobello Brewery Star and was one of the wider beer choices we found in the area on our mini crawl. The pub also makes full use of the expansive pavement space to the front of its corner plot and there are several external bench seats under large green jumbrellas to the side and front pavement sections. And another thing that enamoured me to the way this pub is now being run is that it is a member of the public loo scheme (as advertised by an arrow on the Victorian lamppost outside the pub) meaning that joe public can enter to use their toilets any time it is open.

This is another Victorian pub from their golden age of pub building and decoration. The front of the building proclaims that it was established in 1894, at the very heart of the golden age. I doubt whether it was originally called the Doghouse, as the Victorians didn’t go in for humorous pub names. The exterior is still quite impressive with its pink marble facing topped with ornamental capitals. Inside it’s a very different story, having been largely stripped out and presumably decorated to attract a younger crowd. In fact the customers using the pub during my Saturday afternoon visit were a relatively young lot. It’s got that bare-boarded scrubbed furniture look of a modernised pub, but a fair dollop of quirkiness has been added to the mix. The walls are a patchy mottled orange colour; at the back a few gallons of molten wax has been allowed to run down the wall, but the oddest thing for me was the carpeted front of the bar counter. Personally I think carpets are best placed on the floor (just call me old fashioned) but everyone to their own. It looks as if the original spittoon troughs have been retained in front of the bar counter, which is something you don’t see very often these days. There are two separate bars, with a small connecting doorway at the front of the pub. At the front are a good number of picnic benches, that were well utilised on a warm weekend afternoon. There were three ales on – Bombardier, Abbot and Black Sheep Bitter. The Black Sheep was very good, but at £3.25 a pint more like West End prices. In essence this is not a bad pub, if somewhat odd, but probably not the sort pub to which I would return.