retiredmartin

February 2026. Downham Market.

£9.30 “invested” on an old person’s evening out in Downham Market, and all I had to show for it were some blurred photos from the Crown, which I’m out to convince you is a great pub. Perhaps I can borrow Mrs RM’s superior phone camera (she denies it’s any different).

Even my chosen Chinese takeaway seemed to have closed due to a misunderstanding over a meat cleaver.

But Downham is a town on the up, which has a ring to it. Independent shops, pleasant cafes, the Swan Hotel about to be revived,

and some breweriana for the Pauls.

But only one option for a second pub (bored of the Spoons now, and it was rammed).

The Live & Let Live is as basic a “boozer” (ugh) as you could hope for, an antedote to the sterility of Spoons, and the sort of pub I’ll always be glad exists (see also : Craft Union).

Eddy Grant (78 today, Happy Birthday !) looks on as I judge the Doom Bar.

It’s a 3, Eddy. But is Doom doomed as it jumps off the Rock ?

Anyway, that 3 is better than the good folk of Untappd judged it recently.

In the Good Beer Guide, you say ? Who put it there ? And then I remembered my post from a year ago, and the dog that was even now returning to attack my groin.

Oh. They did.