Pub Odyssey 10

Wednesday 9 March:  BRIDGE HOUSE, HERTFORD (Chris Haden, Elvis Pile, Roger Toms)

COMMENT:  An attenuated turnout this time with a lot of us away; three (Malcolm, David, Jeff) on a bike maintenance course; myself in Malta; and Steve in Bangladesh (where England collapsed before the cricketing power that is Ireland: later England bowed down before the invincible machine that is Bangladesh).  The bike maintenance crew have, I regret to say, suffered a lot of ragging from uncouth non-cyclists who do not realise, as I do, that cyclists represent all that is best and finest in Britain today.  Forget the mocking riff-raff!  They only sound like Jeremy Clarkson, a fate too terrible to contemplate.

Anyway, getting back to the Bridge House, formerly known as the Sele Arms, the reports were of good and not expensive food, and a good time had by the small turnout.  But the pub is interesting in other ways.  So far on the Odyssey we have seen 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th century pubs and a couple of modern ones (post 1975).  The Bridge House is clearly a "between the wars" pub. The invaluable web source, deadpubs.co.uk, states tersely that this pub "may not have been established till the 1930s". To me the Bridge House, seen from the outside, screams "1920-1939". The inter-war years were hard for pubs and breweries with rising taxes and an economic depression (sound familiar?)  and the brewers reacted by trying to create new-style pubs which imitated then popular architectural styles, so you get "arts and crafts" pubs, stockbroker tudor pubs, even art deco pubs.  The Bridge House is clearly stockbroker tudor; seen from the outside it could be a large inter-war house in Brookmans Park or somewhere similar. These pubs were often called "road houses" because they were situated at strategic points on the new highways to catch the hugely increasing car traffic (few seemed to worry about drink driving in those days).  However, in the case of the Bridge House, I suspect it might better be called a "railway house"; it must surely have been set up to catch the punters emerging from Hertford North railway station opposite, opened in 1924.