Kew pubs

A pub with accommodation in a nice location on Kew Green opposite St Annes Church. It sells Youngs beer and does a good variety of food which is well presented and tasty albeit being a tad overpriced. Two bars with comfortable seating. the service was friendly but a little slow. it can get very busy at lunvchtimes as it is only 600 yards from the main entrance to Kew Gardens. Because of its proximity, parking can be a problem. Overall we certainly thought it was worth a visit and had a pleasant atmosphere without the need for television or loud music. Attracts mainly the over 30 age group with a high number of more mature clientele. It was quite posh. Despite being swallowed up into Western Europe's largest metropolis, Kew still maintains something of a village atmosphere, remarkably similar to John Major's daft waffle about cycling vicars, cricket on the green and warm ale in pubs. Well, here I was sitting in a pub drinking a pint of warm ale (the cricket on the green had been rained off) when who should walk in the pub but the local vicar. I momentarily felt that I had been sucked into a parallel universe run by the theistical equivalent of the local Conservative Club, where the British Empire still waived the rules and saved the natives from themselves by killing them, and I feared that any minute some humble local labourers would walk past, doff their caps in a cheerful but deferential manner before being sent off to the Somme to be shot. Fortunately the world soon righted itself; the vicar had only popped in to deliver a letter (have local post office closures gone this far?) and soon left, allowing reality to reassert itself. The magnificent C19th fake Tudor exterior of this pub belies a rather small and disappointing interior, with a fair deal of wasted space in front of the bar, and a rather botched refurbishment leaving bare floorboards clashing mightily with a row of blue felt seats and a nasty yellowish-cream ceiling. On the plus side, it serves a decent range of beers, has a 1970s two-player arcade machine, a wide range of (rather expensive) food and an attractive-looking beer garden. The only other punters were some generously proportioned, potato-shaped men and an American tourist, but it does apparently get very crowded on a Friday and a Saturday. No TV, but it does have the whole eastern section of Kew Green as its front lawn, so it can be worth staring at that instead. Despite a patio looking out over Kew Green and a wonderful Victorian building to inhabit, this pub somehow still manages to be crap. The main culprit is the hideous makeover, where an attempt to transform it into a ye olde worlde rustic charmer has gone horribly wrong, leaving the inside looking like Lovejoy's antiques shop meets Star Trek's The Borg. A surfeit of lamps and silly metal candalabra (complete with fake electric flame - nice!) variously squat upon or hang above every available surface, plates and pictures of cows adorn the walls and - most surreally - every inch of shelf space is covered with empty wine bottles. The intended effect of all this rather eluded me. I sat at my table watching Bill Beaumont lookalikes bark into their mobile phones, the brain-rotting strains of jazz-lite noodling their way into my consciousness and forcing me to consider either suicide or genocide as the best means of escape. If anyone can stand the music for long enough, there is at least decent food on offer, and a large non-smoking area at the rear, but if there isn't room on the patio, or if it happens to be raining, the bitter disappointment of this pub's interior may be too much to stand.

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