Crooked House

The Crooked House is a great example of misfortune transformed into opportunity. When this otherwise unremarkable Staffordshire public house began to slide away from the horizontal into some long forgotten mine workings, the owners stabilised the building and made a feature of the new orientation. The story goes that the pub was built on the boundary between land belonging to the Glynne Estate and that of the Earl of Dudley which explains why the building slumped at an angle - the mining activity only extended under half of the pub. The pub was rescued from almost total collapse in the 1940s and continues in business to the present day. These souvenir postcards make the most of the visual incongruities - tilting doorways and tables where marbles appear to run uphill - in an effort to entice the drinking public into its vertigo-inducing interior. It makes an interesting contrast with the Florida Mystery House, featured in a post in December 2014. 

Irish Extremities

Above is a photo from 2010 of the Seaview Tavern at Malin Head in County Donegal. It is described as the most northerly Bar, Restaurant and Guesthouse complex in Ireland. Below is a photo from 2017 showing O'Sullivans at Crookhaven, County Cork - serving the most southerly pint in Ireland. The third photo is Creedons at Top of Coom on the border of Cork and Kerry. This claims to be Ireland's Highest Pub at 1,046 feet above sea level – there are other claimants to this distinction but none of them are over 1,000 feet. The spartan appearance follows a fire in 2012 – as a result the entire pub had to be rebuilt. All that remains is to locate Ireland’s Lowest Pub.

Postcard of the Day No. 89 – Hampstead Heath

Today’s postcard jaunt takes us to the wide open spaces on the heights of North London. Hampstead Heath is a recreational space that somehow survived the threat of development as the Victorian city expanded along the trajectory of the tube lines. For working Londoners it offered a taste of the countryside within easy reach. As the 6 day working week became established, more and more workers and their families had the leisure to explore the Heath and patronise the large public houses to be found on the perimeter.

What makes this card special is the presence of another photographer in the right foreground recording a threesome posed on the left. It’s impossible to be certain that this was just a coincidence – photographers have always stage-managed their compositions. But it makes a pleasing self-referential moment. We are deep into Cockney-cliché land here – the Old Bull & Bush pub was immortalised in a music hall song by Florrie Forde. The song was fortuitously adapted from an American original, Under the Anheuser Bush of 1903 – sponsored by the St. Louis based brewers, Anheuser-Busch of Budweiser fame. When these cards were produced the pub was owned by brewers Ind Coope of Burton-upon-Trent, whose sign-painters had covered the premises in brilliant demonstrations of their expertise and command of exuberant Edwardian typefaces.