They don't make 'em like they used to
Ignoring the glass-and-chrome style-bar,Alastair Gilmour does the time warp
Fashionable foodies beef over air miles, grouse at nonseasonality and belly-ache about best-befores. Oh, for the days, they wail, when everything was produced locally and freshness was preserved.
A 1913 copy of The Newcastle Daily Journal tells a different story, however. The city’s markets offered Canary tomatoes, Californian apples, Seville oranges and Egyptian dates. It seems, like the poor, food miles have always been with us.
We’re poised with pint and paper in The Sun Inn at Beamish Museum in County Durham, the awardwinning open-air tourist attraction – a town frozen in a 1913, post-Victorian time-warp and a living, working example of Britain at the peak of its industrial output and political influence.
It was previously known as The Tiger Inn before being dismantled stone-by-stone from its site in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, in 1975 and reassembled at Beamish 10 years later – with generous help from Scottish & Newcastle.
It is small, two-roomed and extremely comfortable, although the public bar’s long wooden, high-backed seats look anything but. It is a pub with no regular customers; it closes every day at 4pm (5pm in winter), but keeps three superb cask-conditioned beers; a bonus perhaps, an afternoon delight definitely. It is a haven of gentility, an absolute joy and an unequivocal treasure.
Publican Joanne Taylor is elegantly turned out in high-necked, fuss-free costume which blends comfortably into a background of traditional ale, porcelain jugs and sparkl.....
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By Alastair Gilmour
Section : Spotlight
Page number : 28
