The Great Liverpool Pub Crawl

Apr 12 2008 by Mike Chapple, Liverpool Daily Post

SINCE the Pub Column began in 2004, we've been banging on about how if you want to get to the real beating heart of what makes this place and its people tick you should visit its pubs.

The city centre especially is blessed with a treasure trove of classics brimming with heritage, character and characters.

So, given that legend has it that visits to the Philharmonic and Doctor Duncan's by the Capital of Culture judges swung the vote in our favour five years ago, you would have thought that the great and the good at the city council would have latched on to plugging our pubs as a prime part of the build-up to the 2008 tourist promotion package.

Now, finally, they have and next month sees the full-blown launch of the Around the City in 80 Pubs (geddit!) campaign.

Their Capital of Culture wallahs have enlisted the esteemed know-how of Camra and the Chamber of Commerce to get, you guessed it, 80 pubs on board to participate.

And, after a slow start, they're nearly there.

The Chamber's amiable Peter Jones said that 69 pubs have put forward their CVs to be included in the publicity brochure and a last-minute rush may make up the required number.

What will follow is a summer and early autumn of fun and games when a host of performers from sea shanty warblers to poets and comedians will perform at the designated pubs throughout Merseyside.

Peter is also looking to set up a treasure hunt-style competition in which teams of four, especially those from local businesses, compete to locate pubs from a series of clues.

He wants pub sages and experienced treasure hunters to get in touch (on 0151 227 1234) to furnish clues for a number of trails which, if the interest is there, will take place in June, July and August. There will, he hastens to add, be lots of prizes to be won.

By pure coincidence, at the same time a potential Pulitzer Prize winner will have hit the streets.

It's a book called The Great Liverpool Pub Crawl and it's written by, er, me.

Apologies for gratuitous self publicity but it's been written more as a public service because it was something that really had to be done.

Now it could be argued that with so many closures pub crawls ain't what they were.

But the legendary Smithdown Ten can still be swiftly completed and there are a number of reasonable survivors to make a decent fist out of wandering around Ormskirk if you begin at the Greyhound and finish at the Kicking Donkey.

The greatest one still in existence, though, is the crawl around the centre of Liverpool. Possibly no other city on the planet has so many great drinking hostelries contained within such a relatively small walkable area and with beautiful vistas all the way.

So Yours Truly thought it was time to put a step-by-step guide - or should that be stumble - of 30 pubs together which even that old souse WC Fields couldn't fail to follow.

It starts at the Baltic Fleet at Wapping on the waterfront, ducking and weaving around town until finally flopping down at Worzel Gummidge's homestead, the wonderful Ship and Mitre in Dale Street.

Supplemented by magnificent scenic photography from our Daily Post and Echo team of snappers and blessed with a stunningly original front cover from talented designer Emma Smart, it's destined to be the Capital of Culture book of the year. But I would say that.

I'll shut up now.

By the way, it's out at the end of May.

(Shut-up! - ed).