Pub Odyssey 14

Tuesday 5 April:  OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, Broadwater Crescent, Stevenage ( Malcolm Allen, Mike Horsman, Gerry Murphy, Bob Polydorou, Andrew Swift)

COMMENT:  This is a pub much beloved of the local CAMRA branch, and I thought it encapsulated quite neatly the strengths and weaknesses of the CAMRA approach.  On the plus side, the beer was excellent and I quite liked the decor and the Dickens memorabilia scattered about.  On the minus side, the food options were very limited and if like Malcolm you are a vegetarian a cheese sandwich is what you get- and all you get. I wasn't too thrilled by the service either. Twice I approached the bar to make an order and the bar staff, engaged on something else (though the pub wasn't that busy) walked away.  Good beer is critically important, and I am very grateful for what CAMRA has done and continues to do on that front, but OMF is the sort of place that tends to confirm the suspicion that in assessing pubs CAMRA consider there own obsessions rather than more general attractiveness.

Be that as it may, I did enjoy our visit, the company as always being excellent and the pub an interesting place in unusual ways. From the exterior it lacks all architectural charm, looking what it is, a basic almost prefab construction to service a post-war housing estate.  But what it actually represents is the power of a man's name and reputation.  The man is Charles Dickens (1812-70), the greatest of all English novelists and the greatest writer of any form of English after Shakespeare.  Dickens was a man of London and Kent, but he had a  local presence; he was a friend of Lord Lytton of Knebworth, another successful Victorian novelist- in fact Dickens gave readings of his novels at Knebworth House.  When Lord Lytton decided to set up a pub in Broadwater (a fine late Victorian building, long since gone but pictured on the walls in the current pub) he had it named after the last completed novel of his friend Charles Dickens. In addition Dickens himself, always a generous and open-handed man, set up at some stage near there a sort of superior almshouse for journalists and writers fallen on hard times.  Lord Lytton's pub and the almshouse are long gone, but when a new pub was created on the new housing estate Dickens' name still had the power for the pub to be called "Our Mutual Friend".

Although it seems to have been Dickens' general fame and local activities which led to all this, he did in fact love pubs.  Dickens (like Shakespeare too) was fascinated by English inns, taverns and pubs, their drink, food and culture.  He wrote endlessly about all these things; it has been calculated that 166 public houses of all types from grand to extremely seedy appear in his writings, some inventions of his imagination but many of them real places- we will meet at least two later on in the Odyssey.