The Crown and Shuttle, Shoreditch, E1

Decent enough place with one long room leading to outside seating. Bar to right with ales marked up on the wall. Six hand pumps including Redemption Big Chief IPA @ 5.5% ABV. Would revisit.

Busy pub but fast friendly service.Nice interior.About 5 cask beers on inc London Fields -love not war and my Purity -bunny hops.

An ornate gabled frontage, guarded,bizarrely at tea time on a damp July Saturday, by security staff:a first in my experience. Inside, Steptoe and Son became distressed. I can't really improve on Pub SignMan's description below: Hogarthian springs to mind. Being in the heartland of hipsterdom, craft beer was well represented,including a burnished copper contraption that dispensed some form of lager.more conventionally, a range of handpumps offered a decent range of cask beers from London and around. We enjoyed a Truman's Zephyr and Hammerton N1,both new to me, and both fashionably hazy. Even at this early hour, the place was humming,but we managed to find seats under some scaffolding in the rear garden and realised we were some forty years older than the bright young things surrounding us. Yes, I really liked this place,albeit a long way from the village pubs that I usually enjoy. Bit damn pricey and noisy, though.

This former Truman's pub, with a great location on Shoreditch High Street, close to the station of the same name, had been closed for a remarkable twelve years before being reopened by a local pub company who also operate the nearby Water Poet. The pub is split into two separate bars, both of which are serviced by the same long servery running down the right hand wall. The front half sees a bare boarded room with a tongue and groove bar counter, the top of which is heavily scratched and chipped, plus a bare brick bar back covered in part by various blackboards listing the beer range. A mix of standard tables and chairs and some long flimsy looking benches can be found to the left under similar bare brick walls with blackboards detailing the pub's menu and some odd bits of art made from small panes of stained glass. A large TV screen to the rear of this section remained turned off throughout my visit. A rear wall with a couple of openings masks the rear section of the room, which is also bare boarded and has the same battered looking bar counter running down the right wall. I counted one sofa and two tables with standard chairs here, with most punters happy to stand around near the bar. Above is a sloping roof with skylights and over to the left I noticed a mysterious hatch with some peep-holes which I was tempted to look through. A few more weird bits of art were hung on show along with some mirrors, but again the exposed brickwork dominated. To the rear there is a surprisingly large decked garden, partly covered and full of picnic benches and garden furniture, as well as boasting a kitchen in the shape of an open sided truck, a small, ale-free bar, lots of heating lamps, a mezzanine level lit by dim bulbs and an overwhelming smell of grilled meat. There was pumping music playing throughout the pub, but the garden was a lot more peaceful, despite it being completely packed out there, with each space getting notably busier the further back into the pub you moved. Handpulls are split between the front and rear bars, so be sure to check both or consult the blackboards before ordering. Ale options on this visit were Thornbridge Jaipur, Five Points Pale, Hackney Golden Ale and Porter, Dark Star Partridge and Redemption Fellowship. Keg beers included brews from Blue Point, Fullers and Hackney plus Orchard Pig ciders and the rear room had one of those huge Meantime tanks full of supposedly brewery fresh beer. I had a good pint of the Hackney Golden Ale, served by a slightly surly barman. This is one of those pubs that got better the longer I spent there. I found the front room pretty uninspiring, but the lively rear room and lovely garden were far better and I was definitely warming to the place by the time I left. The loud music on a mid-week evening was a bit off-putting, but a good beer range makes this somewhere worth popping into, perhaps at a quieter time of day.

Stripped back hipster bar, eclectic, bare brick, various unnecessary small stained glass framed in panes on the wall, if you can get over the feel for growing a beard, and the staff being a little dozey, it actually an ok feel & has 6 real ales. There is a cocktail lounge upstairs.

They had six ales on handpump when I visited on Saturday lunchtime – the same as the previous reviewer found, except that I didn’t see the Hoxton Stout but they did have Thornbridge Brother Rabbit. The menu does have the cask ales listed. A word of caution though in case like me you march straight up to the bar without consulting menus first – the cask ales are on two banks of three handpumps with the first bank readily spotted as you enter, but with the second bank down at the far end of the long bar counter. I have to say that I didn’t consider the prices reasonable, based on having to pay £2.20 for a half of Truman’s Runner. It would be astonishing if they did pub grub in somewhere like this. The so-called “big meals” on the menu come “served in a homemade wheat beer & poppy poppy seed flat bread”. Prices range from £6.50 to £8 for such things as “crispy Loomswood duck, watercress, raspberry and beetroot”. I’m not sure what that would look like, as I didn’t make this my lunch stop. The exterior looks quite enticing, but the interior’s been completely trashed. Whatever was on the walls – probably wooden panelling – has been removed at some stage leaving just exposed brickwork. There are some nice bits of furniture, such as an ornate carved wood sideboard, and plenty of attractive high backed chairs coupled with normal wooden tables. There’s virtually no decor on the walls – just a few remnants of old leaded light windows hung there, as already speculated possibly from this pub. I suppose the idea is that the exposed brickwork itself is seen as interesting enough. I didn’t see any TVs or fruit machines, and there was some music playing but I didn’t find it too intrusive. The room stretches back, through brick archways of course, into another room that looks as if it is a later addition to the pub. The furnishings in this room look more basic, including wooden benches and some cheap looking plastic chairs. This room’s roof is sloping, and includes some skylights providing some welcome natural light. This room leads out to a fairly large garden, which is something of a luxury so close to the centre of London. This is a thoroughly madeover pub, with no original features that I could see. Although it’s good to see a long-closed pub brought back to life, this isn’t really my sort of place, and I found the expensive beer – expensive even by London gastropub prices – somewhat offputting.