Walking. Gossip. Travel.

Category: Great Yarmouth

Great Yarmouth – Theatre Tavern

This pub isn’t listed in the Good Beer Guide, not least because it doesn’t sell real ale, but I’ve never visited it before and so Julian and I decided to have a little look inside. It takes its name from the now demolished Theatre Royal first built in 1778 which was located on the other side of the road, which was later demolished to become the Regal Theatre and ended up as a Cannon cinema before it was demolished in the 1980s. The replacement buildings are ugly affairs, it’s a shame that the town lost the attractive theatre building. The pub has had its current name since 1824, meaning it’s not far off its 200th birthday, but there appears to have been a licensed premises here before then called Cups.

There was a tragedy in 1845 when the Great Yarmouth suspension bridge collapsed and the owner of the Theatre Tavern, Mr Harmston, organised a performance at the Theatre Royal to raise money for the families of those who had been killed. Over the decades, many of the performers appearing at the theatre came into the pub, it’s got some considerable heritage.

Wrongly branded glasses as Julian went for a Corona (and the bar did offer lime) and myself a John Smith’s, both tasted fine and were reasonably priced. It was evident that this was a proper community pub, it was busy and there was a vibrant but informal atmosphere so I’m confident that visitors to the town would feel welcome.

The bar area and Julian noted that they were talking about the Sheepdog Peanut Butter whiskey, as he’s sceptical of such flavourings. Fortunately Nathan and I had tried this decadent a shot a few weeks before over the road (well, over a couple of roads) in the Troll Cart pub. I recommend it.

There’s a pool table at the back, which I thought was interesting given the limited space available in the venue. The male toilets are out in the courtyard, seemingly a big improvement when they were installed in 1932 but now increasingly rare.

The old lounge bar sign showing the entrance to what is now the pool room. The bar is open to the front of the pub and has a hatch to the rear, not much has changed in terms of the interior structure over the decades and I think that’s rather wonderful. This is a proper pub with character, not burdened with craft beer or real ale, but nonetheless it seems to be catering very well to its audience and I liked it.

March 30, 2023
Great Yarmouth – South Star / Quayside Tavern (closed)

It’s always sad to see a pub closed, this is the former South Star, later known as the Quayside Tavern and the Quay Pride. It shut a couple of years ago and that closure seems permanent as it appears to be a private residence now. It took its name from the South Star Battery which was a defensive structure built in 1782. Norfolk Heritage Explorer notes that the back garden wall has some reused materials from the former Blackfriars Friary which was dissolved in the 1530s. These are attractive Lacons buildings which are located in numerous places around Great Yarmouth, a distinctive design from the 1920s.

March 30, 2023
Great Yarmouth – Blackfriars Tavern (Second Visit)

This is my second visit to this really very good pub, which I waxed lyrical about before. This time I had visited on a day trip with another Julian where we went to all the Good Beer Guide pubs, plus another pub that looked interesting that I hadn’t been to before.

The welcome was just as effusive this time and I was delighted to see that they have a food menu which I hadn’t realised before.

And I like a pie! They didn’t have a couple of choices available, but they’re home made and the steak and kidney pie was excellent, plenty of steak without any of the fatty bits so that’s a win. Much better than the processed stuff that some pubs sell.

The former smoke room entrance that I hadn’t noticed on my previous visit. I didn’t mention last time that the pub takes it name from the former Blackfriars church which existed in this area. There are bits of that building, which burnt in 1525 and was dissolved in 1534, still visible in the South Star (now closed) and Feathers Inn pubs.

Many of these bottles are for sale, I think I thought that they were decorative last time. This is why I need to revisit pubs to find out things I hadn’t initially realised…… I’m not always the most observant.

The Stout Robin from Barsham Brewery was very agreeable, well kept and had a roasted flavour which suitably complemented my pie.

I won’t repeat what I wrote in my previous post about this pub, the same applied on this visit and I think it’s a welcoming and inviting place with a landlord who understands pubs. But once again, I will say that anyone visiting Great Yarmouth who likes pubs with a comfortable atmosphere would be well advised to take a slight detour to get here. All very lovely.

March 30, 2023
Great Yarmouth – Blackfriars Tavern

Firstly, my apologies that I wasn’t intending to write up the day that Nathan I spent visiting all the Good Beer Guide pubs in Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft. This means that I didn’t burden myself with taking many photos, so my extensive readership of two will just have to use their imagination a bit more than usual. I am slowly, but very surely, visiting every pub in the Good Beer Guide which is an impossible project but that doesn’t stop me. This pub in Great Yarmouth (94 Blackfriars’ Road, NR30 3BZ) is just a little out of the way, so credit once again to the Good Beer Guide for listing this venue.

Let me start by writing up-front that this is a very good pub and I was absolutely unable to fault it. The warmth of the welcome, the engagement from who I am guessing is the landlord, the range of the beers and the inviting nature of the environment. This is going to be one of those feel good posts where just everything went well. As a pre-cursor to the below, the landlord mentioned to us that he had just written a blog post that day about the beer Nathan ordered, so for some extra context have a read of https://www.blackfriarstavern.co.uk/the-story-of-the-starry-night-stout-and-the-three-wise-men/. That web-site is a work of art on its own with the width of their offering being clearly evident.

I went for the Recessive Red from the reliable Mr Winter’s and this was a well kept quite punchy 6% red ale. There were two darker beers with Nathan going for the Starry Night Stout from Tindall Brewing and checking through his Untappd he was happy with it and its smoothness. He probably told me at the time, but I doubt I was listening. We were on one of our random days out with occasional shots (it’s a long story, but we should probably be supervised by a responsible adult if I’m being honest), which is why there’s a delicious shot sitting next to my real ale. I don’t actually want to focus on the beer choice for too long, but it was excellent for a venue of this size with five real ales and an extensive Belgian beer selection. And the pub wasn’t just offering beers, the landlord was positively enthusing about them. This is a landlord that cares about his beer.

The reason that I don’t want to linger on the beer is that this wasn’t the highlight of the visit, and in many ways, it shouldn’t be. The star of the show was the friendly landlord, engaging and welcoming. He also didn’t demur about our random shot and just slightly odd behaviour, he positively embraced it and so no criticisms there. There were plenty of board games and Nathan rushed over with chess as he’s from a chess winning family. Privately I suspect that’s as he didn’t want to play monopoly for four hours which is what I would have ended up doing. Although he quite rightly mentioned that it would have been no hardship staying here for several hours. Incidentally, he won at chess, but I like letting him win as it cheers him up.

There’s also a very decent refurbishment that has gone on here, it’s traditional but yet on-trend which is a hard thing to achieve. There’s nothing formulaic about this pub, it’s laid-back, it’s slightly quirky and it does the welcoming thing well. I’ve mentioned before that one of the key measures of a pub is that someone coming in on their own, perhaps new to the area, feels like it’s a venue they’re part of and a community to which they feel they can join. I absolutely got that feeling here, this is absolutely right to be in the Good Beer Guide, it’s glorious. Anyone coming to Great Yarmouth who likes pubs should pop in and linger here for some time.

March 1, 2023
Great Yarmouth – Brewer’s Chip Saloon

And as part of my irregular series on chip options at Great Yarmouth market….. This is the car park end of Yarmouth market and I didn’t know that these two stalls were located here, I thought they were all at the other end of the covered market. Liam was also able to pop over for lunch, despite being very busy building a bridge.

There was consistently a much longer queue for Brewer’s than their neighbour, which didn’t have any queue at all. There are perhaps three main reasons for this, (i) the chips are much better, (ii) the British just like queueing or (iii) the denizens of Great Yarmouth have noted that the medium chips are 10p cheaper at this stall than their neighbour. My reason for queueing here was the second one, I decided that if other people were queueing that they must know something that I didn’t.

The chips were £1.30, which seemed very reasonable to me, with the sauce being free of charge. I like this policy as I’m easily pleased with free gestures. I really don’t feel that I’m a chips connoisseur, since they mostly all taste the same to me. The ones here were perhaps a little crunchier than their nearby rivals, but they were entirely satisfactory to me. I’m not sure I’d say they were any better or worse than other stalls, but each to their own.

The service was also friendly and unhurried, although the staff member was going at a decent pace to serve customers. They didn’t accept cards, but otherwise their Covid handling seemed pretty perfect to me, with a sizeable Perspex screen. So, all rather lovely for £1.30 and I think I might come back here again.

March 30, 2021
Great Yarmouth – Docwra’s Chip Stall

I’m not sure what the best strategy is in terms of choosing between the various chip stalls at Great Yarmouth market. I decided on the practical solution of going under the covered section of the market to try and avoid any seagull related attacks. The owner of this stall, Norma Docwra, said in the local press a couple of years ago that the seagulls were becoming an increasing problem and she’s not wrong. There was one seagull who hopped along at one stage, but I followed that advice of staring at it, and it merrily hopped off. Rarely do wild animals or birds do what I expect, so this pleased me. Anyway, I digress.

There’s a plethora of chip coverings at the stall, including curry sauce, chicken gravy, onion gravy, cheese, BBQ sauce, beans, mayo, burger sauce, spicy chilli sauce, sweet chilli sauce and chilli con care. Or, if those don’t appeal, there are sachets of tomato ketchup and brown sauce for 10p each.

I went for topless chips, just adulterated in a positive way (I’m not sure that’s a thing) with salt and vinegar. I’m not one for large portions of chips, so went for the £1.20 option which proved to be entirely sufficient. Ignoring the toppings options, I like stalls where there’s just one product for sale, it makes things much easier.

The chips were fine, not greasy, sufficiently plentiful for the money, hot and at the appropriate hot temperature. I’m not really a chip expert, so I don’t know what they were cooked in. There were two staff members, the younger one was happy and bubbly (the other one was the owner and she was serving another customer, so she might have been just as happy and bubbly but I wasn’t paying attention) so there was a friendly feel to the whole arrangement.

All rather lovely and excellent value at £1.20. Based on this, and for comparison purposes, I might start a little research survey of other Great Yarmouth food options at the market.

July 24, 2020
Great Yarmouth – Tombstone Saloon

Tucked away a little, although within a short walk of the main market-place is this Good Beer Guide listed pub in Great Yarmouth. Calling itself a saloon, not least because of its American west theme, it’s the bar section of the Tombstone Brewery. It’s an under-stated location from the exterior and until about ten years ago, this was the home of the restaurant Cafe Nova. Indeed, some of the decoration from that period as a tapas restaurant remains today as the bar area.

A decent selection of real ale, particularly given the trading limitations that all pubs currently have. The pub was also busy, with someone at nearly every table, and there was a relaxed atmosphere in the pub. There were numerous tempting options visible at the bar, not least the scampi fries, with a range of different beer types.

I opted for the Tindall Stout, which was reasonably priced at £3.30. There are a couple of stouts produced by the Tindall Brewery, a small–scale local producer from nearby, in Seething, but the board didn’t name which one it was. I’m guessing though that it was the caramel stout and I came to that conclusion because I thought it tasted of caramel…. It seemed a little weak in body at first, but the aftertaste was rich and moreish, so a decent beer.

The wild west theme hasn’t been taken too far, but it adds character and atmosphere to the surroundings. The service was polite and the pub staff were following the current guidelines in terms of taking customer details. A fair few pubs aren’t doing this very well at the moment, and although I can’t say it overly bothers me, it does show a level of professionalism. It’s not the largest of pubs either, so I can imagine that it gets relatively busy during a warm balmy day in summer. Well, I like to think that tourists come here in a reasonable number anyway.

There wasn’t really anything exceptional about my visit that I can add, although that doesn’t mean there was any particular problem. But the customer service didn’t engage beyond the minimum, so there’s not much more I can add about that. I would say though that it felt like the kind of pub where you’d soon be known after visiting a few times, it had that sort of character to it. The selection of beers and ciders, as well as spirits, is also well above the average and so I can see why it’s listed in the Good Beer Guide.

July 23, 2020
Great Yarmouth – Name Origin

Since I’m on a roll with these name origins, and I want a relatively complete list for Norfolk, back to The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of English Placenames.

Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. Gernemwa in Domesday Book, Gernemuta Magna in 1254. The mouth of the River Yare.

The Magna means great, which is solely to avoid confusion with Southtown on the southern side of the river, formerly known as Little Yarmouth. The word origin is different from Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight, but the word Great has probably persisted to differentiate those two towns. ‘Garienis’ is the Saxon word for the River Yare, so it started with something like ‘Garmud’ and that ‘d’ at the end was pronounced as ‘th’.

June 12, 2020
London – British Museum (Ship Tavern, Great Yarmouth)

I usually visit the British Museum three or four times a year, something which is a little difficult to do with the current virus situation, primarily because it’s shut. However, they’ve placed hundreds of thousands of images on their web-site, so this will have to do me for the moment. The images can be used non-commercially, as long as the British Museum is credited. So, this is their credit.

I’m not sure that there’s much advertising from pubs at the turn of the nineteenth century surviving, especially not in two languages. But this advertising card in English and German is now in the collection of the British Museum and they acquired it in 1960 from the estate of Sir Ambrose Heal. Heal was a collector of trade cards, and had a large number in his collection, as well being the chairman of Heal’s on Tottenham Court Road, which is still trading.

The Ship Tavern is though sadly no longer trading, it lasted from the 1760s until 2010, being located next to Row 84 in the town. But there’s something quite captivating about how multi-national the docks and port of Great Yarmouth once were. Indeed, in 1797 this pub had welcomed (I use welcomed slightly loosely here….) Dutch naval prisoners from the Battle of Camperdown. As for William Ungleman who produced these trade cards, he ran the pub between September 1809 and 1819, but I have no idea where he went after that.

May 7, 2020
Great Yarmouth – Community Garden

I haven’t noticed this before, it’s a community garden which is located outside of Great Yarmouth’s library. Once this space was occupied by Rows 104 and 106, but they were destroyed by bombings during the Second World War and this area was remodelled. The hand-crafted totem pole is part of the community garden’s art project, designed alongside the sculptor Jason Parr and installed here in 2011.

This is an interesting survival, it’s the former sign above the entrance to the Corn Hall on Howard Street, which opened in October 1871. The building was used by a corn merchants and a general sale room before it was demolished in the 1960s due to road widening.

November 28, 2019