Free Trade Inn, Byker

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Today my wife and I drove up to Newcastle for a few days. After a long and painful drive, I was in desperate need of a pint. This pub, in Byker (a suburb of Newcastle) was an excellent choice. A pint of amber ale cost me £4.50. It’s in the Good Beer Guide, and the staff were very friendly and helpful.

It sells up to nine real ales and five ciders. According to the Camra’s pubs website, they have an extensive range of foreign bottled beers (my friend John would love this). They also have a free juke box; the music being played while we were there was excellent.

We sat in the window; the photo below shows the view along the river, back towards Newcastle.

After the long drive I also needed to stretch my legs, so we walked along the Quayside to the pub. It was a pleasant walk. I’ll be publishing some of the photos I took on that walk soon. I did plan to get the bus back into town, but it was diverted due to a broken bridge along the route. We had to get a taxi.

You can just about make out the pub in the photo below, a long distance shot along the Tyne.

Cumberland Arms, Byker

There’s another excellent pub just up the road, the Cumberland Arms. It’s in Camra’s national inventory of pubs and the Good Beer Guide. A number of people (including staff at the Free Trade Inn) told us that it was really, really worth visiting. Sadly, we never got there (a reason to come back me thinks).

We didn’t get there because I had trouble phoning it and suspected it was closed down (it’s not). It’s also difficult to get to as no public transport seems to go nearby. The original idea was to get a taxi there. Have a few bevies and then walk down to the Free Trade Inn. After that, the bus (Q3) back into town. Given the problems with the bus, it’s probably a good job we didn’t.

Expensive Newcastle City Centre Pubs

Back in the centre of Newcastle we drank in a number of Good Beer Guide pubs. None are worth a mention; they were mostly large corporate pubs with no character. The one big problem was the cost of a pint, the cheapest was £4.90, the most expensive was a whopping £6.20. It’s almost certainly the most expensive pint I’ve ever had in this country. I was going to have two pints, no chance!

There are cheaper alternatives in the centre of Newcastle, I’ll talk about these in my next journal post.

An Awful Curry

There’s a guy in Glasgow who writes about curry houses on his Curry-Heute website. Thanks to him, we found two excellent curry houses in Glasgow. This time he let us down, on his recommendation we had a curry at My Delphi on Clayton Street. It wasn’t the worst curry we’ve had. But it was a very close second. Don’t go there.

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