The Antwerp Arms, Tottenham, N17

Official site of The Antwerp Arms - www.antwerparms.co.uk

Official site of The Antwerp Arms - www.antwerparms.co.uk

There is a lot to like about this pub and the ever thorough PSM review needs little extra from me.The interior has had a spruce up with a light wood floor,smart furniture and two fireplaces along the right wall hinting at a previous multi room interior.It sits at the end of some terraced houses and opposite a park,and is well used by a bunch of regulars who banter amongst themselves in a friendly manner. This close to the Tottenham Stadium means it will be rammed on match days ,and will do well financially.I went in on a non match day and found it calm,there are reasonably priced pub grub options,a flatscreen with mute BT Sports and 4 handpumps offering on my trip Five Points XPA,Redemption Pale and Hopspur (Very well kept,NBSS 4 and reasonable £4 for a 4.5%er)The ale is GBG quality,so hopefully the local CAMRA branch will agree. Very pleased this local has been saved and preserved for all folk to enjoy in a pleasant little corner of Tottenham.Should be visited when in the area.

This is a good-sized back-street local’s pub, close to White Hart Lane Stadium and with an emphasis on well-kept cask ale. You enter to a compact front bar area with the servery on the rear wall and some very limited seating options around the perimeter, mainly under the front windows. The servery has a pleasant dark wood counter and traditional bar back whilst the rest of the room boasts some rather nice partitioning screens with attractive decorative panes. Décor is fairly simple, with the eye generally caught by the TV screens dotted around the walls showing muted live football. The room extends down the right-hand side for a long way to the rear, with tile flooring and half panelled tongue and groove walls with cream uppers throughout. Things have been brightened up somewhat by the addition of some art prints, old photos and a dartboard, although more of the above is needed in reality, as these are long plain walls that need as much sprucing up as they can get. A couple of skylights and a large patio door to the rear help illuminate this part of the room in daylight hours and there was another TV screen also showing the muted football match. The patio doors open out to a beer garden furnished with some sturdy looking benches and popular with the smokers who were constantly coming and going throughout my stay. It goes without saying that my visit, immediately after a Spurs home fixture, saw the place rammed, but the staff coped pretty well at the bar and it was far easier to get served than it was to move through the pub. The four operational handpulls were all dispensing beer from the nearby Redemption brewery, with Hopspur, Pale Ale, Trinity and Fellowship all available on this occasion. My pint of the Trinity was very well kept and slipped down nicely, perhaps because the locals seemed to be putting away a lot of the redemption beers between them, ensuring good throughput. I definitely could’ve caught this pub at a better time, but despite the crowds and lack of standing room, I really enjoyed my visit here, having a bit of good banter with some Spurs fans and enjoying the tasty local beer. It’s nice to see a back-street boozer in an unfashionable neighbourhood turn things around and start doing well for itself – I’ll try to get back out here on a non-match day to appreciate the place at a slower pace.

This is a pub that's been on my radar for some while, and this week I finally summoned the will to get myself up to Tottenham to pay it a visit. And I'm glad I did. There are four handpumps, but only three are ever in use, with often only two with the third being brought into use when Spurs are at home. But when I visited on Monday three were clipped - Wadworth Dirty Rucker (but which had apparently finished the previous evening), plus the Redemption pair of Pale Ale and Hopspur. The Hopspur was in very good condition, and at the very reasonable price of £3.30 a pint for a 4.5% beer. The kitchens aren't yet up and running. This is now a community owned pub, having been saved from the grave by a relatively recent campaign. It's a simple one-room pub with a modern bare-boarded floor, and mainly furnished with with banquettes and normal tables and chairs, but with a couple of armchairs. The pub has been extended at the back with the addition of a conservatory, which leads out to a garden at the back. This is an attractive out-of-the way pub, that would no doubt originally have been built to meed the needs of the less well-heeled members of the community. There are attractive bowed and lattice glazed windows at the front, a nice brick fireplace on the right, but other than that period features are in short supply here. The bar back and counter are both modern, but the (grey painted) panneling on the walls may be old, if not original, features. I saw an advert for live football matches to be shown, but when I was in at early doors on Monday lunchtime only one of the three TVs was on, showing some midday news programme. I also saw a piano residing at the back near the conservatory. I was the only customer so cannot comment on the usual evening atmosphere of the place, but the barman/landlord told me that they get very busy on matchdays (no surprise there!), to the extent that they ensure that they have three ales on. The number of ales that they have on is constrained by the limited stillage that they have available. Despite, or perhaps because of, its simplicity I really liked this little pub. It has a delightful setting looking out over Bruce Castle Park, plus my pint of Hopspur was on super form. This is a little oasis in a desert of pubs that don't do real ale in this area, and is the sort of enterprise that fully deserves our support. I plan to return sometime.