retiredmartin

November 2024. Cambridge.

After visiting Mum in Addenbrookes, I needed a long, long, chilly walk.

Oh, and a pint in the Kingston, one of the Mill Road Run’s yo-yo pubs.

Don’t pubs look gorgeous at dusk ?

The Kingston only re-opened a year ago, and though the price list isn’t completely accurate,

the pub itself has already reacquired that lived-in look I sometimes find missing in revived pubs (see here), helped by some characterful locals and legendary landlord of Histon Red Lion Mark’s collection of tat.

There’s a Bass tray, and now actual Bass on the bar, the first red triangle on a hand pump in Cambridge since the millennium.

It could do with a red triangle on the glass as well, and a touch crisper pint would help, but there’s no doubting the landlord’s enthusiasm for the beer as he tells a group of Old Boys (not us) on a pub crawl how the trick is “turnover, turnover”. If it gets it, this could be a Top 10 Bass pub.

Ella sings “Blue Moon”, a lament to City’s season of despair,

and I stay for a second Bass, slightly better than the first, proving my point. And as I watch Mark work the room, coming over to chat with customers, the Kingston suddenly feels like a classic again.

He’ll probably put Double Diamond on if you ask him nicely, I hear it’s big in London.