Priory Arms

Address: 83 Lansdowne Way, SW8 2PB

Nearest Station: Stockwell

Welcome: Good; Service: Good (SIT); Beer: Adequate; Toilets: Basic

Cost of two pints: £7.20 (Firebrand Cross Pacific Pale Ale)

Guest: Jim; Word: Attention-seeking; Person: Alan Sugar

Rating: 7.5/10

We’ve made it to the final pub of Pub Impressions, and we can’t avoid it any longer.  It’s time to talk about CAMRA.  CAMRA, or the Campaign for Real Ale, aims to promote real ale, real cider and the traditional British pub.  All good things, you might think, and this is true – but how do you define real ale?  By how it’s made, or how it tastes?  Sadly, for CAMRA, it’s the former, and as we found at the Priory Arms, this isn’t enough.  The Priory Arms has been featured for 21 consecutive years in the Good Beer Guide.  (If you don’t believe them, they have the guides in the corner to show you.)  They offer a number of local ales, and frequently change them (as all the beer mats on the wall attest).  But when we visited, there wasn’t a single good beer to drink.

The Harp

Address: 47 Chandos Place, WC2N 4HS

Nearest Station: Charing Cross

Welcome: Good; Service: Good (SIT); Beer: Good; Toilets: Basic

Cost of two pints and a vodka lemonade: £11.20 (Palmers Copper Ale and Sambrook’s Wandle)

Guest: Jim; Word: Clustered; Person: Alfred the Butler, Batman

Rating: 8/10

To say that The Harp was different to The Porterhouse would be a considerable understatement.  From dark and spacious to light and – in Jim’s word – ‘clustered’, the contrast was stark, but The Harp was not found wanting.  The most striking first impression was the beer mats all around the bar to the ceiling.  This is a pub which highlights its focus on real ale; its CAMRA awards are displayed prominently.  We squeezed through the tiny gap by the bar to order our drinks, finding there a good selection including Palmers (a personal favourite), Sambrook’s and others.  We claimed for ourselves the tiniest of corners and took the opportunity to look around.