#005 Bristol Pear, Selly Oak : 1996 to 2020 (Revisited)

I don't visit the Bristol Pear frequently, but this hostelry has the dubious honour of being the last pub I drank in before the current lockdown!

I have made occasional visits over the past few years, but this is what I wrote in 2011: -

I first visited The Station in the late 70's when I was a student. My vague recollection is that it was a pub for locals and full of 'old' people (at a guess, about the age I am now!) so I wasn't a frequent visitor.

As I lived in the area, over the years I visited a few more times and it was completely refurbished some years later. During this period, The Station was a regular stop off for a pint whilst our Chinese takeaway was being prepared on a Saturday evening. During this phase of its existence it was reasonably welcoming and catered for all ages. 

The picture below is from 1996 when I was visiting close to the end of our canal trip to Llangollen and Chester on the evening of Thursday 5th September 1996.

Not many years after this the pub was completely revamped into an 'It's a Scream' pub and renamed the Bristol Pear. This was Mitchells & Butlers way of making student friendly pubs, which seemed to work. On the odd occasions we visited it was full and loud, but strangely the layout was the same as before! The picture below is from the evening of Thursday 3rd June 2004 at the end of a short trip exploring some of the hidden canals in Birmingham.

Finally we come to the afternoon of Thursday 21st July 2011. I'm still an infrequent visitor, but it survives by being apparently what the students want, so who am I to argue?


It's a funny thing; when I was young this pub was full of old people, but now I'm 'old' it's full of young people so it has never been one of my favourite pubs...oh for a time machine.


I'm not sure if The Station was one of The Pub Curmudgeon's haunts when he too was a student in Brum, but I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for his help and encouragement with this blog and I'll finish with a story that will not help his blood pressure!

The last time I was in the Bristol Pear was on a Saturday evening and we were served our lager in plastic pints. We were told that this rule had come in after some trouble (unspecified at that time) and plastics must be used for beer after 7pm in all pubs in Selly Oak! The next pub we went to was The S'oak (a new establishment) where again we were served our pints in plastics. This time we found out the cause - in separate incidents someone had been glassed and someone had been badly cut after falling onto a broken glass. So maybe the precautions were warranted...except...the person had been glassed with a Coke glass and the person who'd fallen fell onto a wine glass. Neither of these types of glass had been banned!
I don't know if these restrictions are still in place as I've no real desire to go back and drink out of plastic!

I can confirm that the practice of drinking out of 'plastics' was a thankfully, short-lived phenomenon!

The next time I took photos was on the afternoon of Friday 6th June 2014.

As it happens, very little had changed in the passing three years.

Moving on to the time of Covid-19 and the first lockdown, I took these photos on my permitted exercise on the afternoon of Wednesday 8th April 2020.

 That is quite a refurbishment! The 'Scream!' pubs were bought by Stonegate (from Mitchells & Butlers) in 2010, but they ran them in a similar fashion for several years. The Bristol Pear is now part of the 'Common Room' brand within Stonegate (other brands include Slug & Lettuce, Walkabout, Yates to name a few). I do like the new look, but to my mind, you can't beat the classic décor from 1996 when it was still The Station!

#263 The Four Candles, Oxford : 1998 to 2019 (That Déja vu Feeling All Over Again!)

It is very rare that the same pub crops up in consecutive posts on this blog (under the original premise, it should be impossible) and yet here it is.

As we sat upstairs in the The Four Candles I had the feeling that I'd been here before. I thought I remembered it as the place where a fairly distinguished middle-aged gentleman claimed to know me. He was well-spoken dressed in proper teacher/lecturer mode (complete with elbow patches on his jacket). He sat down with us and expected a pint. In these circumstances, I'm far too nice, but, fortunately my friends (in no uncertain terms) told him to go away!

But, no! This couldn't be the same place. So I dismissed the idea and didn't mention it to anyone. That was until today, when I was going through my old photos looking for potential new blog posts and I came across this picture from 1998!

I'm fairly sure that it was lunchtime on Saturday 5th September 1998 (We had three sessions in Oxford on that trip!). Back then it was a Yates's Wine Lodge and I have no other recollections about it.

Fast forward to lunchtime on Saturday 29th July 2019 and this was the view.

Further research (What Pub) shows that it, briefly, became a Slug & Lettuce pub in 2007/08 and then became a Wetherspoon's in 2008.

This is a perfect example of why I first started taking these pictures in 1986 and there will be another example in the following weeks of how memory doesn't necessarily log everything for future reference.