Saturday 12 December 2015

How my Pub Crawling Started

My Pub Crawling career started way back in late 1980 and early 1981. Me and my best mate Steve were challenged to do all pubs in Ilkeston, a Derbyshire town with a good stock of pubs and most were local brewery tied to Shipstones, Home Ales and Kimberley. Well we did well over 40 pubs in the town and the seed was set.

We started to get round other local pubs and another mate, Nick, joined in. We became The Pub Club. Our aim was to visit as many different pubs as possible. Our first major pub crawl away from our local Nottingham and Derbyshire area was to York. Five drinking sessions over the weekend and 73 new pubs done - we were all well pleased.

It was now time to start writing all of these pubs down; what we had done over the last year or so. So we all got some sort of note book and listed the different pubs we had done. I got a thick cash book for my pubs, which I still use to this date. From May 1982 all pubs visited were dated, plus pub name and brewery tie. We did this in rough books and then wrote them down neatly in our pub books.

We did more weekends away to Chester and down London to stay with a mate in Blackheath,where two of us slept on the floor. By the end of 1981 I had done 1,044 different pubs.

1983 was to be a great year on all fronts, loads of local pubs done and weekends in London and Lincoln with the pub club, with just under a 1,000 pubs done in the year. I ended 1983 on 2,027 new pubs. I also met my wife to be in November 1983, she would become my new pub crawling partner over the next 10 years or so. 

The Pub club disbanded in late 1984. My pub crawling had now slowed down a bit, by the end of 1984 I had done 2,540 new pubs. I continued doing my pub crawls with my wife, and my brother also drove me to pubs that were not so easy to reach on public transport.

By the end of 2014 I had done 11,235 new pubs. Now almost up to date and I have done just under another 500 new pubs in 2015. I hope 2016 will be has good as 2015 for my pub crawling.

Cheers, Alan Winfield.

2 comments:

  1. Welcome to blogging Alan. I really enjoyed reading the posts so far. Lovely photos too.

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  2. Thanks for the kind comments Martin,

    It is early days so just finding my feet at the moment,there will be more pub crawls to come both new and old.

    ReplyDelete