Luxor4u

Said by a south of the river Brixtonian.

Over the North side our water if different..
I was wondering as at the river head is at the end of the street it's like fort knox where the pumps are.
the victorian holding tanks are at the top of the hill, a marvel of engineering..

There has been good water here from Hertfordshire since 1613 The Amwell Springs.
Good name, methinks.

So, I was wondering about today's source and supply, like 'would it be a target for a 'thermonuclear-inter-european
rocket strike. 'Makes you wonder I'll take a picture.

I was telling a local landlord "It's all down to the Clerkenwell water and getting pi**ed,
I mean that Marx chappie dreamt up all this commie idea whilst pi**ed down in The Crown PH".

I mean, where I live atop *Merlin's Well years ago all the proletariat from far & wide came here got
well pi**ed listen to a load of old 'waffle then went on the rampage....

Never believe a man when he is pi**ed, "he will tell you it's day when it's night.
Never ever trust a drunk..

Anyhow whilst looking up info, I came across this fascinating site:
https://alondoninheritance.com/london-b ... erkenwell/

* Sir Henry Hunt 'I kid you not 'spouting forth to a well p*ssed, posse of the proletariat from
an upstairs window here in 1830 20,000 people turned up...

It kicked off from here way back in Wat Tyler's day 1370ish..



"Merlin's' Cave has had three incarnations the last was a jazz club closing in the 80's.
A favorite of that weirdo George Melly or so they say........

I quite liked this in today's Private Eye;.....

Ps: Only 37,000 new covid cases yesterday, it's definitely over Boris...
'not to be mistaken for those other Boris':
Boris Serebryakov, Soviet serial killer and mass murderer known as the "Kuybyshev Monster"
or that other Boris:
Boris Shaposhnikov,
Soviet Russian general,
Chief of the Staff of the Red Army, and Marshal of the Soviet Union.

Boris is a russian name is it not ?

Who2 wrote: Thu Mar 03, 2022 5:41 pm

Boris is a russian name is it not ?

Certainly is. Who can forget that other Boris….Yeltsin.

First President of the Russian Federation and well known alcoholic.

Largely responsible for the rise of the oligarchs and facilitator of their ill-gotten gains

Just like our own Boris……..

Note the mad tall scarecrow geezer on the right wanting to kill all the bishops..
And I also noted besides 'fine cordials Merlin's Well sold Gin, Beers and Tobacco.

20,000 thirsty listeners is an awful lot of booze.

We had three gin distilleries down on turnmill street in them days...
Oh! and two breweries over in St John Street now, Waitrose's the other posh apartments.

As the Brixtonian stated "It's essence is in the brixton water No you daft sod "it's in the bricks and mortar"

One you should ponder........

Your mention of Amwell Springs took me back to the early 1950's. My grandfather on my fathers side was the engineer in charge of the water pumping station at Amwell. It was a huge old Victorian edifice with great steam pumps. My grandparents lived nearby in Stanstead St Margarets and we would go up and stay with them for our Summer holidays. We would walk across the fields to Haileybury School and on to Hertford Heath woods going past a big old crater made by a V1 which had overshot London. Childhood memoies.

You learn something new every day. Now I never knew this :

Lenin had an office next to the Crown PH! where I knew Marx drank.

Quote: Lenin drank at several pubs in the area, including The Crown in Clerkenwell Green next to his office. The Crown was a venue for the music hall acts that were a part of the new emerging 20th century working class leisure culture. It seems likely that this influenced one of Lenin’s more interesting comments..

Hotbed of revolution round here, also that Michael Collins, he of an independent Ireland worked in the sorting office
at Mount Pleasant, 'not a lot of people know that!
Loads of 'finians around once upon a time.. and forget trying to get a drink on May Day..


The Crown has an amazing upstairs room,,,


Or used to have...

Mind You! more turned up on the Green when Banksy was having a laugh than on May Day..

Imagine trying to fight your way to the Crown over in the distance through that lot....

I'm off for my Saturday stroll along the market to The Eagle, read the papers but first came across this:
As the old saying goes:



He who keeps one eye on the past is blind in one eye
But he who keeps no eye on the past is blind in both eyes.


The (provisional) End
* * *


APPENDIX
Recommended pubs to visit
Both the pubs mentioned are historically interesting in different ways; but they are frequented mostly by office workers and
professionals for after-work drinking, so are not your average back-street local pub servicing local people. Those few local pubs of that type that have so far survived the ruinous gentrification and/or brewery theming processes are too rare and valuable to be casually exposed here. But if you want good ale, these two can provide for the thirsty explorer.

Ye Old Mitre is in Ely Court, which is a narrow alley that runs between Hatton Garden and Ely Place. It serves some fine real ales. It has been a tavern since 1546, though rebuilt in Georgian times. Originally built by the Bishop of Ely Palace for the use of his servants, the present building dates from the 18th century. (The pub’s name derives from the mitre headware worn by Bishops.) “The graceful sweep of Ely Place was built in 1773 on a very ancient and historic site. Ely House had been the London palace and estate of the Bishops of Ely. It became the Spanish Embassy in the 1620s; and when it was demolished the first building to go up in its place was almost certainly - if usual practice is anything to go by - the little mews pub which would first serve the builders as a canteen and would then become a modest place of refreshment for the servant population of the new houses.” (London by Pub - Pub Walks Around Historic London, Ted Bruning, 2001.)

Close by and well worth visiting is St Etheldreda’s Church in Ely Place; it dates from 1298, though the crypt is even older. It was the first church in London to hear a Catholic mass after the Reformation. “St Etheldreda (630-679) was a Saxon Abbess of Ely,daughter of Anna, King of East Angles. She is sometimes known as Audry… At the fair of St Audry in Ely cheap necklaces made of worthless glass beads used to be sold under the name tawdry laces, which gives us the adjective tawdry.”
“During the Middle Ages, the part of modern Cambridgeshire known as the Isle of Ely was subject to the authority of the Bishops of Ely. When the bishops established their London base in Holborn in the late 13th century, they secured the agreement of the Crown to treat their palace similarly. This, and its grounds, were thus exempt from the jurisdiction of both the king’s sheriff and the local Church hierarchy. In the 16th century, the bishops lost much of their property to the Hatton family. In 1772, they sold to the Crown what remained of their land, by then amounting to little more than the present Ely Place and adjoining Mitre Court. After these were built in 1773, their inhabitants claimed independence from the adjacent Liberty of Saffron Hill, as occupants of both Crown land and of what they alleged to be still part of the See of Ely (and thus part of what had now become Cambridgeshire). The licensing and opening hours of the Mitre tavern long remained under the control of the Cambridgeshire justices, and the (claimed) exemption of Ely Place residents from payment of the Liberty poor rate was ended only in 1835. In other respects Place and Court continued to enjoy a special status. The Ely Place Improvements Act of 1842 provided for its government by elected commissioners with powers to levy rates and see to the “paving, lighting, watching, cleaning and improving” of the area. This arrangement lasted until 1901, when most of the powers of the commissioners were transferred to Holborn Borough Council. But the Act is still on the statute book, the commissioners still meet, and Ely Place remains one of the last private roads in Inner London.” (Streets of Old Holborn, op. cit.)

The Jerusalem Tavern in Britton St is owned by the small St Peter’s Brewery of Suffolk and carries a full range of their very fine ales. They acquired the building in 1996 and named it after earlier Taverns that had existed nearby in the 14th and 18th
centuries. Built in the 1720s, originally as a residential house, it later became a watchmakers’ workshop. The shopfront was added in 1810. It was a café for many years until the Brewery made it a pub in 1996.

The décor is an attempt to recreate an 18th century tavern; it’s debatable whether this qualifies as an over-the-top Theme Pub or a working museum, but it’s more interesting than most and its saving grace is its superb beer selection.

CHEERS!

===========

Ps: The Jerusalem closed during the 1st lockdown a great favorite of ours.
sadly missed...

Pss: I met the Queens' Father Christmas in The Old Mitre, Billy he only works once a year for her,clever old Billy. tata...