Crown and Anchor, London SW9
Just as the curious tourist can take a few short steps off the beaten track in Venice and encounter a prelapsarian paradise of authenticity – sleepy bars, cluttered haberdasheries, dusty boatyards – just yards from St Mark’s Square, so the visitor to Brixton who wants to “keep it real” will find all the reality he or she can handle on Brixton Road, half a mile north of the tube station.
Not that the process of gentrification is any less strongly established here than elsewhere in the parish. Victorian houses, divided into flats in the 20th century, are reassembling themselves into houses to the west of the main drag; to the east, large apartment blocks, none of them a match for the distinctive social housing built by Lambeth borough architects in the 1970s, are sprouting. And somewhere in the middle, among shops and businesses that are defiantly scruffy and proudly diverse, you’ll find the Crown and Anchor.
It’s a perfectly normal London boozer – what is sometimes disparagingly called an “old man’s pub” – that was gutted and reopened a few years ago by an enterprising mini chain, London Village Inns. The inside is one long space, with the bar along the side. Bare brick walls are decorated with blackboards and beer adverts. The floor and the furniture are well-worn timber – there’s a slight Calamity Jane feel about the place. But it’s sturdy and spacious, and pre-Covid it only ever felt really full during a dalliance with big-screen rugby (another measure of gentrification, of course) last year.
These days, the safety measures seem sound; the inside is well ventilated, but most people prefer to sit outside on picnic tables in a little squarelet separating the main road from a resolutely ungentrified park. I used to come in often for a meditative Stiegl-Goldbräu on my way home from the office. In those halcyon days, the pub’s offer was built on an impressive selection of keg and cask beers on the one hand, and an easy-going, knockabout sociability on the other. Since it reopened I’ve been back a couple of times, and found both elements still in place, or as nearly as one could expect.
246 Brixton Road, SW9 6AQ; 020 7737 0060; crownandanchorbrixton.co.uk