Real Ale, Real Music

A traditional Leeds pub still displaying its amazing heritage, plus an excellent gig, and a few other bits and pieces.... The Cardigan Arms is a huge, solid-looking building situated on the Kirkstall Road in the Leeds suburb of Burley. I mentioned last time that I hadn't been since it was taken over by Kirkstall Brewery last year, but I decided to put that right when I was visiting Leeds last weekend. It was originally owned by Tetleys and I was a regular visitor when I lived in Leeds back in the early 1980's. It was a rambling old place, with several rooms, lots of wood panelling, etched glass windows, and huge mirrors. It was always busy, a friendly local with an eclectic mix of people drawn by the superb beer from the brewery a mile or two down the road.  Spectacular: the bar at the Cardigan Arms, Leeds But, more of that in a minute. The night before I visited the Cardigan, I had been in Halifax. I was off to see Richard Dawson at the Minster, but prior to that

A classic Halifax pub that continues to thrive, and some other bits.... In the not-so distant past, when Halifax wasn't so on-trend, any comparisons with Shoreditch would have been met with puzzled, nay alarmed, looks, and the town centre was a wasteland for places where you could get a decent pint, chances are that the discerning beer drinker would have headed to the bottom end of town and landed up at the Three Pigeons on South Parade, midway between the railway station and the local theatre of dreams, aka The Shay. Flying high: The Three Pigeons, Halifax I have been going in 'the Pigs' almost as long as I have been watching Halifax Town, so that's well over 40 years. It has lost out to other places for a time over the years - most notably the much-missed Pump Room and Sean Garvey's Dirty Dicks - but it has drawn us back so many times. These days, we tend to have a pre-match pint at the Grayston Unity or the Victorian Craft Beer Cafe, but post-match analys

I bumped into an old mate the other week and he very kindly invited me on his 60th birthday do, which was to be a trip on an old Halifax Corporation bus to an undisclosed 'Yorkshire market town', the name of which he refused to reveal. The astute amongst you may have sussed out by now that it was to be Knaresborough.... So, I headed down to Brighouse bus station last Sunday morning, and sure enough, an old AEC bus was waiting for us, decked out in the old familiar colours of orange and green. Birthday boy Tony checked in virtually a full bus load, and finally told us the destination once we boarded the old bus, where my mate Mick and I had decided to hit the upper deck. Less leg room than buses today, we remembered once it set off that in those days the suspension was unable to stop you feeling every bump in the road. After an hour and a half of bumping and bouncing on the unforgiving seats, we gratefully arrived at our destination. I had forgotten what the old buses were l