October 2025: Kings, Queens And A Hip New Beer Called Bass

A monthly newsletter about London beer and pubs written by Will Hawkes

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Queen of the Scene

It’s Thursday afternoon and business partners Dav Sahota and Simon Wallen are working hard to have the Queen Charlotte, a thin slice of a pub on Goodge Street, ready for reopening next week. A delivery of Anspach & Hobday’s London Black arrives. “It’ll be awesome to have that on the bar,” says Simon, one of life’s enthusiasts.

In the current pub market, of course, enthusiasm is absolutely crucial - and perhaps nowhere more than here on Goodge Street. This is the Queen Charlotte’s third relaunch in just over a decade, a series that neatly illustrates how London’s beer world has evolved. Back in 2012 this pub - previously known as the Northumberland Arms - joined the Draft House chain that played such a key role in making craft beer mainstream in London. Then, in 2018, it became part of Brewdog when Draft House was bought out. 

Now, with Brewdog having departed earlier this year, it’s become part of Dav and Simon’s group, a group that currently consists of just two pubs: the Blue Maid in Borough, reopened in April, and the Queen Charlotte. 

Brewdog are currently experiencing a period of retrenchment in London. They appear to be taking the Wetherspoons approach, to focus on bigger sites with higher football (Waterloo, Paddington), albeit without Spoons’ solid financial footing. Smaller places are being jettisoned. 

Not only the Queen Charlotte, but also the Tankard in Kennington, while Brewdog bars in Brixton and Shoreditch (which, according to one former employee I chatted to recently, has “absolutely fucked” plumbing) are currently on the market. (Some of these places will presumably be sublet by Brewdog. Is landlordism punk?)

Brewdog have made a clean break with the Queen Charlotte, though, with the sole exception of the staff, all of whom have carried over to the new regime. So what can customers expect? “Hopefully we can add some of the service that I think we do so well at the Blue Maid,” says Simon, “and maybe a bit more freedom in terms of the beers we can offer.”

“I’m involved in [Brighton brewery] Unbarred as well,” adds Dav, “but we don’t have any obligations [to them]. I think we can offer fantastic value compared to much of central London; we’re going to be bringing the £5 cask we offer at the Blue Maid here. We’ve got three cask lines, and we think that’s enough: we want it to be fresh and affordable, so it’s drunk quickly.”  

Aussie Simon and Dav, introduced by a mutual friend three years and united by a desire to run pubs, are part of a small but growing group of entrepreneurs providing variety in a London pub landscape increasingly dominated by big chains. “You look at what Jack [Duignan] has done with the King’s Arms in Bethnal Green, that’s become [my] new Sunday local. He’s proof that it’s a working model.”

“Then you’ve got Alice and Oli [Carter-Esdale] at the Hand and Marigold in Bermondsey,” adds Dav, “and on the more food-led side there’s Heath [Ball] up in Highgate, running the Angel and the Red Lion and Sun. They’re all people who believe in the future of pubs; it’s not easy, it’s unrelenting, but that’s our job. We’ve got to make it work.”

With two venues added in quick time (although, as Dav points out, the Blue Maid took much longer than planned due to a variety of hiccups, including squatters), you might expect the pair to have their eyes on another pub. “We have moved quite quickly,” admits Simon. “This [the Queen Charlotte] was an opportunity we couldn’t miss out on. 

“Going forward the plan is to grow, but organically, at the right time in the right place. Dav knows I would love to have a pub in East London, when the time comes.” 

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Yah Wobble

A Walthamstow beer event that doesn’t include Blackhorse Lane? Doesn’t seem legal, yet here we are. From Thursday 6th until Sunday 9th November, the Wood Street Wobble will be taking place along that very thoroughfare, taking in three venues (Wood Street Bear, Real Al and Clapton Craft) and over 20 cask ales. Check their socials for more details.

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Gipsies Move On

As reported by James Beeson in the Grocer, Gipsy Hill’s core products will now be brewed in Kent. Parent company Sunrise Alliance Beverages has decided to shift production to the Curious Brewery in Ashford in the face of persistent losses and rent hikes.

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See Bass

A hip new beer launching in Hoxton? Big deal. The hip new beer is Bass? Colour me intrigued, as the kids say. Wednesday night saw a fancy do laid on to celebrate Bass’s clothing collab with fashionable catering clothing company Service Works, at the Macbeth in Hoxton Street. A host of influencers turned up to enjoy free Bass - poured from two handpumps - some excellent grub (venison samosas, yes please) and the clothing itself, a black overshirt arrangement featuring Bass’s iconic logo.

It might seem a frivolous thing (and, tbh, it was), but it’s a sign of the commitment AB InBev is currently showing to Bass, a brand it appeared to have forgotten. That it finally remembered is largely thanks to a group of old geezers who decided to start a list of where to find Bass around the country. That’s the beauty of cask beer: the culture is created by the people who drink it, and marketeers follow. It doesn’t work like that with other drinks.

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Open and Shut

A lot of pub news this month. Ye Olde Swiss Cottage is for sale; McGlynn’s in Kings Cross is reopening and now it’s owned by artist Peter Doig (read this, btw, it’s marvellous); The Three Lords, a former Young’s Pub in the City of London, has been taken on by London Brewing; The Black Eel, owned by Exale, is opening in an East London pie-and-mash shop; Meantime is returning to Greenwich in the form of The Dial; and The Crown in Limehouse has reopened. 

And that’s not all. The bloke in West London who periodically renames his pub The Trump Arms has done it again; The White Horse Old Ale festival takes place next weekend, despite the pub’s diminishing commitment to good beer; and this is interesting on the subject of London’s oldest pub.

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Warm Welcome

How do you fancy drinking beer at 9am along with a cooked breakfast? Well, here’s your chance. Pubco Young’s is hosting a breakfast to celebrate this year’s launch of its winter/Burton ale, Winter Warmer, at the Lamb Tavern in Leadenhall Market. Tickets are £30 and include “exclusive Young’s merchandise”.

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Two Pubs, One City: Chelsea Potter & Cadogan Arms, SW3

I visit the Kings Road about once every five years, and it always surprises me. For some reason - probably to do with deep-seated prejudice - I have constructed an image of the King’s Road in my head that is much fancier than the reality. Don’t get me wrong: it is posh (although less so the closer you get to World’s End, goodness me), but it’s more Tunbridge Wells than Mayfair. 

Yes, there’s the Saatchi Gallery, but across the road Boots sits next to Russell and Bromley. There are more Barbour jackets than Balenciaga (I had to look that one up). There are schoolkids in private-school garms, old ladies chatting in the entrance to Marks and Sparks, innumerable badly-behaved small dogs. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, I saw just one Ferrari and just one Bentley (many Land Rovers, though) crawling down the King’s Road. It’s middle England, the sort of place where Robert Jenrick would find little to bemoan.

I mention all this because, as you may have seen, The King’s Road is about to get its first new pub “in 100 years”: The Trafalgar, in a grade-II listed bank. It’s opening next week, bringing the total number of pubs on the King’s Road to three - still quite a poor total, and much fewer than back in the 60s and 70s, when this part of town had more booze (and edge).

Much has changed since, of course, and continues to do so. At the moment, two of the road’s most legendary drinking spots - The Chelsea Drugstore, featured in You Can’t Always Get What You Want and The Clockwork Orange, and the Markham Arms - are unoccupied, having been vacated by (respectively) McDonalds and a bank chain. Might they be next to return to the pub fold? We can but hope.

And the King’s Road definitely needs a few new pubs, if only to raise standards. At the Chelsea Potter, a man and a woman behind the bar are having a terse conversation as I enter. “I can’t believe you were using this, it’s corroded,” he tells her, proffering a wire that leads to one of the contactless machines. She’s pouring me a pint of Greene King IPA (£6.60) but stops to go over and have it out with him. “It was working,” she says. He looks dubious. “I’m not a liar,” she insists, a touch weakly.

I leave them to it. The Greene King IPA is flat, too cold and tastes vaguely of pear drops; I should have gone for Madri or Peroni, which is what everyone else is drinking. It’s quite busy. An older lady at a high table drinking G&T; a Spanish family eating, every dish served with chips; a suited man outside, drinking Madri and methodically smoking his way through a packet of Benson and Hedges.

The lozenge-shaped room itself is nice - good bones, I think you’d say - with a long bar on one side and huge windows on two of the others. But it’s Greene King, so they’ve fucked it up a bit. There’s some inviting (and occupied) banquette bench seating at the front, but high tables throughout elsewhere. Why not put the banquette all the way round? Why not serve Greene King’s flagship beer in decent condition, in a clean glass? Why not update the Cask Marque sticker in the window that says you got 5/5 for quality back in 2019?

Enough moaning, it won’t make any difference to Greene King you know! And anyway, there’s a lot to enjoy here, not least because The Chelsea Potter feels like a posh pub as they used to be. In my early days of drinking, back in the 1990s, often the only way of knowing if a pub was posh was the clientele. The pub itself looked exactly the same as the other ones, except all the punters were wearing Hunter wellies. Then the gastropub emerged and everything changed.

Anyway, I’ve somehow managed to finish the IPA - I’m nothing if not persistent - so I leave. Outside a woman is pointing at a sofa in the window of Caravane, a French boutique next door. “That’s the one I wanted,” she says to her pal. It is a nice sofa.

Across the road, the Trafalgar - which takes the name of another closed King’s Road pub, once located at 200 King’s Road - is a hive of activity. A man is talking to a group of people inside, chairs are being rearranged, two chaps are busying themselves behind the bar. In truth, it looks more like a brasserie than a pub, but there are cask ale pumps on the bar (of which one will be dispensing Tim Taylor’s Landlord, intel fans).

They serve Tim Taylor’s Boltmaker down the road at the Cadogan Arms - or, at least, they did last Wednesday. If the Chelsea Potter is a posh pub as they used to be, then the Cadogan Arms is very much a fancy boozer of the modern day. The back half of the pub is given over entirely to diners - ‘please wait to be seated’ a sign says! - and the decor is magnificent. It’s a rhapsody in pale green and brown. There’s a marvellous long, carved-wood and tiling bar; brown tiles all over; padded barstools; beer mats with the pub’s crest on them (composed mainly of animals you might expect to eat here); a moulded plaster ceiling, chandeliers and mirrors everywhere.

The welcome is warm, too; well, the barman asks me how I am after I order a pint of Boltmaker (£7.50). It’s not quite as busy as the Chelsea Potter, although there’s a regular stream of traffic. “Can we sit here OK cool,” says an American woman to a barman, before her pal (also American) goes to the bar (“She’ll do a Pinot Noir”); an older lady sits outside with a pint of lager; a young man has his (late) lunch accompanied by a glass of Doom Bar.

It’s very pleasant. If I’d so chosen, I could have had one of the pub’s “Signature Serves”, a Sticky Toffee Old Fashioned, which seems about as Kings Road a drink as you could imagine. I wonder if they’ll have anything as on the nose in the new Trafalgar? I’ll have to come back to check, in five years. 

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on londonbeercity@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Unsubscribe here.  Help me keep the newsletter free here. Thanks for reading!