22 MINUTES BETWEEN TRAINS IN LEEDS

April 2025. Leeds.

While BRAPA brings up the two-thirds mark in the GBG, my own progress towards a second completion is rather more sedate.

Here’s a good example why, as I spend a 4 pint afternoon in West Yorkshire and come away with a solitary tick. You see, once you complete the Guide, you lose discipline.

22 minutes waiting at Leeds before the trundler to Menston. That’s time for a pint, surely ?

Leeds Station is a mess, been like this for years. The Scarbrough Hotel is somewhere behind that fence.

A bit like finding your way out of Birmingham Station, I never feel entirely confident leaving Leeds for the mass of pubs around Mill Hill and New Station Street.

22 minutes isn’t long enough to dither over whether to revisit Head of Steam or Bundobust, Wapentake or Tapped, so let’s go in the Brewery Tap. They’re all owned by Cameron’s, anyway.

I thought it had been years since I ticked Leeds’ Tap, but it seems it was 2019, a trip famous for train staff offering upgrades to 1st class to staff helping them clear up vomit.

I thought it was plain then,

and it still felt a bit “Head of Steam” lite now.

Someone had just checked in a 7.2 % Rooster sour, so I felt obliged to follow suit. Perhaps they’d notice I’d toasted them and come and find me and start a lifelong friendship (shorter in my case).

Look, that thin glass does beer no favours at all. And a quiet pub with dangling lightbulbs is no place to drink sours.

It’s far too clinical, the sort of pub you expect to hear Mika, and at the moment I get up to go on comes “Grace Kelly”, and then a group of six lads my age (probably all 32) on a pub crawl arrive.

One of these days I’LL go on a pub crawl.

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Published by retiredmartin

Retired NHS, doing long walks around UK and the world to record the great bits. Focused on Good Beer Guide pubs and live music.

15 thoughts on “22 MINUTES BETWEEN TRAINS IN LEEDS”

    2. The former Prince of Wales is now a Craft Union called the Moot Hall, I believe. And is still a tricky find if you only have 22 minutes between trains.

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  2. I’ve always found the Leeds Brewery Tap a *good* filler of those odd 22 minutes that timetable planners always insert at the behest of breweries and pub companies. But then I wouldn’t be drinking a 7.2% sour out of the wrong glass!

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  3. “One of these days I’LL go on a pub crawl.”

    You’ve been on pub crawls but they’re called things like “a proper day out” or #pub-research-trips. Or the Quest for the Holy Grail, perhaps.

    That’d be a good one. “I’m thinking of a Quest for the Holy Grail in Crookes” (or Ecclesall – with or without the optional H) sounds so much more civilised than “how about a night on the lash?”

    Not Leeds though. The Holy Grail is not in Leeds. Though I had a couple of very good beers in the Kirkstall Brewery Tap, to celebrate the Leeds Rhinos victory today. Does that count?

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  4. Last Wednesday morning I had sixteen minutes between trains on Leeds railway station, heading towards Skipton’s Woolly Sheep, and last Saturday morning I had thirty-four minutes between trains on Leeds railway station, heading towards Manchester’s Hare and Hounds.

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      1. The 16 minutes was 10.10 to 10.16am.
        For 34 minutes I was eagerly anticipating the Hare and Hounds which proves that a pub is for two pints as I read not long ago.

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      1. Etu,
        But it sold seven pints to me over three days and was getting busy by early lunchtime.
        It reminded me of the Great Western, the flagship pub not being the brewery tap, and it’s on a cobbled street.

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