retiredmartin

30th January 2020

Typical ingratitude. Last January I award Wolverhampton my City of the Year and their team does the double over City, surely putting an end to our title chances.

A proper football club, bang in the heart of the city, and a proper pub town as we’ve seen many times over the last three years. I believe Stafford Paul has the Great Western App on his phone so they have his pint of Golden Glow ready for him.Paul will be horrified I failed to do the Western, or any Banks’s boozer, on this trip.I’d have enjoyed his and Curry Charles’ company on this exceptionally featureless slog between my hotel and two (count ’em) micropubs and back to town.

Yep, seven miles round the western extremities of Wolves; and some people thing I’ve got an easy life. I know you’d have got a taxi.The Starting Gate is only ten minutes from my guest house, an easy start.

It’s really just a local bar, filling quite a cask gap in this part of Penn.Nice welcome, nice beer range, Westlife on the stereo. 2 out of 3 etc.

The micros round here seem a bit more spacious than the pokey bijou ones in Kent, which give them more character and you can take your half pint on a guided tour of staircases, racecourse memorabilia and board games kept in a locked cabinet.

Hard to fault, and a nice sherberty Newbridge Fox (NBSS 3), but when the only locals are standing at the bar and you’re sitting it’s hard to join in the banter, unless someone says “Say, anyone know a good pub in Halifax“. They didn’t.

My straight line up alongside the A4150/A449 finds Wolves quiet on Friday night at the end of the January.

Thirty years ago the local football ground was the scruffy poor relation of most cities, but now Molineux and the Etihad and Sixfields tower majestically over town centres.

The A449 fails to shine on the two mile slog to Oxley, Hanson’s advert apart.

At least I didn’t stumble into the red light district just east of the Great Western this time.All the comfort I need is at this worryingly-named micro in the row of shops marking Oxley as a distinct Wolves suburb.

Well, this was fantastic. Cheery ladies at the bar, cheery regulars, the dogs were probably cheery too, I didn’t check.The only obvious pub for miles, Hungry Horse apart, so you get the full community works including the “Balance The Brexit 50p On A Lemon” challenge.

Not excessively beery, either, but a Three Tuns and 3d Coffee Milk Stout that seemed popular.

A group had assembled to watch Nigel Farage wave goodbye to the EU on the telly, but mostly it was locals walking to their dog to the pub and back.

Must have been thirty in when I left, all in their 50s I noted before realising, oh.A great community pub, only needing a metro extension from St Georges and a firm commitment that the casual acoustic night includes Dire Straits covers.