Science Museum and the Lost Cider Houses of London

Posted on 2011/04/03 13:17:19 (April 2011).

[Wednesday 30th March 2011]
Went along with some people from work to a late evening opening at the Science Museum. For some reason or other I'm not really a big fan of the Science Museum - maybe because I get enough "science" in my day job and really want something different in my spare time. So I didn't stay very long.

Headed back home by way of Belgravia, and called in at the Nag's Head, which was surprisingly deserted - I've never seen it so quiet. I had a rather blissful time there reading a 1960s London pub guide they had on the shelf. Pleasingly a lot of the celebrated pubs of that era are still going strong today, and it was interesting that the "best of the best" from almost half a century ago are pretty much the same as what contemporary pub guides would tend to list as London's finest.

Of course though there were a few pubs in the book which have since disappeared, most intriguingly was a Weston's Cider House which was at 4 Woodfield Place, in Paddington. Yes - a dedicated cider pub, in London! Even then (around 1965?) it was reported as being the last of its kind, Weston's apparently had several others in London which has closed over the preceding decade, and I assume from the lack of any information about it on the web the one in the book didn't survive past the sixties. However it is interesting, I had assumed the difficulty in finding cider in London today was just the way it always had been, it not really being a drink produced in this region of England - but it seems that London's conspicuous absence of cider is actually more of a modern thing.

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