Pint Of Ale

Oh dear. This is the first pub since I turned 18 that I have ever walked out of, leaving a semi-drunk pint, because of a general feeling of misery hanging about the place. This is really disappointing because The Junction is a lovely looking pub and only about a mile away from where I live.

It was a drizzly, miserable early evening when we visited just before end of December 2006. The damp air probably put us in damp spirits but the pub brought them down further. Let me prefix the rest of this entry by pointing out that we are not sure if the pub is undergoing restoration or not. We felt that is was not, but if it was then the rest of this entry could be read in a different light.

There are two rooms in The Junction. We initially chose the one on the left. It was bare and shabby. There were two local youths around the fruit machine in the corner and not much else. There was an empty wooden cabinet in the front corner by the door. Bare grey wires stuck out of the wall above the bar where we ordered our drinks (a San Miguel and a white wine) from a less than interested woman and had a lengthy wait for them to arrive. There was no cask ale or even a nitro-keg ’smooth’ alternative.

Feeling less than welcome we moved to the room on the right which was very brightly lit and a little less sparse. It had the feel of a doctor’s waiting room, or the lounge of an empty old people’s home. My San Miguel tasted a bit too bitter and altogether unpleasant, but I did not take it back for a replacement. A small TV played a celebrity edition of The Weakest Link. The bar staff chatted to friends by the bar. We did not feel at all welcome in this strange bland pub so we left our drinks and pegged it over to nearby Bojangles.

It’s really difficult to explain just why we felt so awful here. Was it the bright lights? The bare shabbiness of the place, the staff, or were we just in bad moods? The beer was truly awful and the wine was not much better. I’ve tried searching the web for other reviews and the only one I came across was a glowing review from 2005 that seems to have been written by someone who either owns the place, works there, or otherwise knows the pub extremely well, at Pub Utopia. This was not the pub that we experienced.

I was really disappointed with our experience of the Junction as it had always looked appealing from the outside and was a hitherto unexplored Pudsey pub.

I hate writing a bad review, especially of a local establishment, so please use the comment feature below if you would like to shed a brighter light on The Junction!