Not much competition for my worst pub visit of 2020:


Small Beer, Crouch End, London N8


This shop conversion has been a pub for quite some time, so doesn't belong to the recent trend for micropubs. It's fairly small, dim and grungy, with a bar in the dimmer recesses of the rear of the single room. There are four hand pumps, with nothing I liked the look of, so I perused the keg options, plumping for a wheat beer from The Kernel, a brewery whose bottled ales I occasionally pick up from shops in Sheffield but whose kegged versions I had yet to try. Well, it was cold, fizzy and lacking in anything interesting by way of flavour; what was I expecting?

What else can I say about Small Beer? As well as being dark, minimalist, uninviting, with bare brick walls and challenging background music, it has the worst pub toilets I have ever used. The urinals were made out of some sort of metal boxes - taking a pee was like putting your most vulnerable fleshy parts into a letter box; and you can imagine how difficult it must be to clean something like that. The solution (it's so obvious, really): let's not bother! Seriously, these toilets have *never* been cleaned.

rating: 1 (but only because negative ratings are not available).