Pub Odyssey 30

Wednesday 3 August:  THE JOHN BUNYAN, COLEMAN GREEN (Chris Haden, Mike Horsman, Gerry Murphy, Elvis Pile, David Room, John Westwood)

The John Bunyan is a nice spick-and-span little pub a long way from anywhere, a McMullen's pub with decent food and beer, and one of the few pubs where nearly all the clientele seemed to be older  than us!  It was a sweat getting there on the bike,following a narrow road which was once the Roman road from St Albans to Welwyn.  The John Bunyan is a hard pub to get much information about. In the first half of the twentieth century it was called the "Prince of Wales".  At some point its name was changed to the "John Bunyan" to commemorate the great religious writer, John Bunyan (1628-1688), author of the "Pilgrims Progress", who apparently stayed and preached in a neighbouring cottage of which only the chimney now remains. Bunyan was based in Bedfordshire (and spent a lot of time in jails there as a member of a persecuted Nonconformist minority) but was often in Hertfordshire and preached in many of its villages,   He is, however, a bizarre choice of figurehead for a pub because like most Puritans he had little time for popular entertainments.  He thought he was descending towards hell because he could not break his liking for profanity, dancing and bell-ringing.  He doesn't specifically discuss pub-crawling, so far as I know, but I fear it too would in his view be regarded as a step on the road to hellfire. So it isn't altogether logical to have a pub named after him.  But who cares about logic?  In the pub garden Elvis was telling us that the Great British Beer Festival would be bad for him, too much drink; he was going out with Richard Thelwell instead.