MORE CULTURAL BARNSLEY !

September 2026. Barnsley.

Back home from Kent, a man’s mind turns to exploration.

In search of “recommended” pubs, I head to Greater Barnsley, which has all the life and vitality Huntingdon lacks.

“Kooth” ? I’d just about caught up with “rad” and “sick” and the kidz invent another new word.

There’s loads of youth about in Barnsley town centre, none of them admiring the elegant town centre,

or the “trees growing out buildings” exhibition (on until October 19th),

or standing to admire the red phone box turned into a poetry display.

By Simon Armitage, but you knew that.

Pubs aside, I’m a big fan of Barnsley, but you knew that as well. The borough to the west covers some of England’s greatest countryside, and the town hall encapsulates the sense of civic pride you feel in town.

Home to Experience Barnsley, one of the UK’s great social history museums, and also one of its busiest.

A simple formula, fill the rooms with childhood memories like Mousetrap and terrifying Nativity puppets,

and watch gentlefolk flock in on a Thursday lunchtime to relive their youth.

There’s a TV playing (unintentionally hilarious) highlights of Barnsley FC, and a sign for the local brewery with an oddly Germanic font.

But can you still get Barnsley Bitter in Barnsley ?

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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.

21 thoughts on “MORE CULTURAL BARNSLEY !”

  1. The font looks like a variation of Olde English which might have been borrowed by Germanic folk.
    I remember it being commonplace when I joined a march through the town over fifty years ago protesting against Courage’s proposed closure of the Barnsley Brewery whose Barnsley Bitter had a strong local following.

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    1. A Barnsley acquaintance one remarked of the closure “I don’t know what all t’ cry were about. It were reet weak stuff”.

      Happy days.

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      2. Etu, No weaker than t’other Yorkshire Bitters of the time if my memory serves me correctly.
        Aye Bill, and while staying with Martin and Christine in 2023 I supped both Acorn and Stancil versions, neither quite the beer of when I were a lad.

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      3. Absolutely, Paul.

        Along the whole Rugby League corridor they were often not only weak but pretty poor in flavour as I recall.

        I don’t miss them one bit.

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    1. Most folk will be impressed you’ve been to Barnsley, Lana.

      I was confused as I’d previously been to the Barnsley Civic Theatre, rather than the museum, which also had some great exhibitions. The Town Hall is one of the most impressive in the UK.

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  4. There was a coffee table like the one in the photo in our house when we moved in. Soon went on a bonfire. However, we didn’t inherit a copy of that cutting-edge publication, Teenage Wildlife Barnsley, the Voice of Angry Young South Yorkshire back in the 70s.

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    1. Bill, I still have the teak coffee table I made during O Level Woodwork lessons when I were a lad.
      We only dreamt of drinking coffee back then though !

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      1. My Mum kept the wooden stall I made her in woodwork at 12 till the day she died, in fact it’s in front of my feet at this very moment.

        I’m interested in when (proper) coffee drinking became a thing in this country, probably early ’90s/

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      3. When I were a lad, coffee meant Camp, made with milk. With a skin on it. Absolutely horrible. It came as a revelation to me that it was possible to make coffee with Nescafe and hot water.

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      5. Bill, Woodwork was one of my Grade 1 O Level passes. It not being a ‘proper’ subject for applying to University meant I was dissuaded from doing Woodwork A Level and so ended up with a working life less interesting than that of a carpenter.
        My other Grade 1 O Level pass was Geography, all about different places, but I’ve not been as good at discovering them as Martin has.

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      6. One of my daughters has the papier-mâché plate I made when I was nine years old. (Her sister lost the tug-of war.) It is, as she proudly told me, the only family heirloom, and had been gathering dust in my mother’s house for 50 years, but she somehow neglected to frame my school reports. Didn’t even use them for papier-mâché. She was otherwise of sound mind. (This is my mother still, not my daughter.)

        My daughters have inherited, and use, all the brain cells that I would have had if I hadn’t destroyed so many through drinking the demon alcohol. I like to think I can still construct a sentence or two (2), though.

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