Clifton used up its edginess quotient on its hilltop location. The rest of it is MOR comfort, brim-full of Lovely Things shops, cobbled streets, coffee shops, and high-ceilinged townhouses. It’s been lording it over the rest of the city for centuries, and shows no sign of stopping.
However, most of Clifton’s pubs have been cocking a snook at their passing trade for quite some time. While most pedestrians look as if they’ve stepped straight off the Fulham Road, Clifton hostelries defy such polish and sheen – the Coach and Horses, Somerset House, the Portcullis, the Grapes, to name but a few, are a good yard of ale away from the gastropub template you might expect for these parts.
It’s rather gratifying, and I suspect Cliftonites rather like it too, even if they might not dip into these places too often; it gives the area Bristolian virtues it struggles to present elsewhere.
This is the outside space what I mentioned. Thanks to Bristol Culture for the image.
Of course, the Albion lets the show down terribly, sitting as it does in a cobbled alley of its very own – hardly the most down-home statement to be made. It has large peachy awnings outside, beneath which sprawl a selection of pink-cheeked puddings and panda-tanned pricks, bawling and drawling at each other in accents that are most definitely without rotic curl.
Inside lies a crackling fire, open-plan kitchen and solid oak tables. All very comfortable, but for some reason, not especially inviting – not, at least, till you’ve got to the bar and hidden from the haughtier sorts. Despite the grandstanding of the restaurant menu, the Albion tries to keep its pubby heart beating – there are actually drinkers standing up by the pumps, not every table is laid up for dining, and it continues to offer a bar menu (even if this has now been repurposed as ‘tapas’), as well as homemade pork scratchings. Okay, so it’s not quite a packet of Planter’s, but it’s a good effort, and it has a decent choice of ales.
You’ll be amazed to discover that none of these things come cheap. For some, the fact that a pint in an expensively upholstered pub in Bristol’s very own SW6 costs more than elsewhere seems to come as something of a shock. I hope this review has forewarned you sufficiently.