The County Arms on Watlington Street in Reading is shutting down. This is the pub I used in One Night Stand, renamed The Mouse and Duck.
It also used to be my local. I used to meet my friend Jenny there once a week for pints of cider. They used to do rather splendid jacket potatoes with tuna and sweetcorn and architectural salads. We went there for New Year’s Eve for a couple of years, and sang “The Timewarp” on the karaoke machine. I’ve got a photo on my desk of me and my friends at a table in the County Arms, hugging and laughing. At the time, my husband and I lived in a damp, cold basement flat and I was working as a teacher, and some days when I got home from school and it was particularly unpleasant in our flat, I used to bring my marking to the County Arms and do it in a corner near the radiator, whilst nursing a grapefruit juice and soda. The same people were always at the bar and through various landlords, there was always the same arrangement of plastic flowers in the ladies’ toilet.
I was very fond of it. The pub in my book is seedier than the real one, and the people in it are different, but it’s the same basic architecture. The heroine Eleanor first kisses her one night stand George just underneath where the “For Sale” sign is in the picture above, and Hugh’s normal seat is in the right-hand window.
I haven’t had a chance to hang out there for quite a while, but it’s a very vivid place in my memory and imagination. I’m sorry to see it go.
Oh that is SAD! Especially cos having read ONS, I feel like I’ve been to this pub myself
SOmetimes, pubs come back — stronger than ever.
Fingers crossed that they find someone who loves it and wants to make into something special.
So many pubs are disappearing these days. It’s all very sad. Fingers crossed that someone takes it over and makes a go of it.
Oh no! My local has nearly gone under, but survived; however we’ve already lost one pub in the village and another’s up for sale. Dark days…
That’s sad, Julie. Good thing you wrote the book to keep it alive in the memory, really.
Poor pub. I remember the pub where I met my hubby closing…it was reborn as a medical center.
It’s very sad to see pubs going. Reading still has plenty of them, but there are a lot of chains, which are pretty soulless places.