The Newman Arms

 23 Rathbone St, London, W1T 1NQ  

It’s so tiny – but so clean. The Newman Arms is a lovely old pub just behind Tottenham Court Road. It’s a bit white, but then so is Fitzrovia darling, which is the official area of London you are in when you are drinking in the road outside the pub.

The toilet is also tiny but clean. The door is right next to the end of the bar – which is convenient – but launches you straight into the toilet cubicle, complete with rather two steps you have to go up in order to reach the bog itself – which is not. In fact it’s rather confusing and possibly downright dangerous if one was any more pissed than we were, which was not very.

As for the surroundings, well all the requisites were there including mirror, paper, white tiles, black and white convenience etc. But because of the confusion about how to lock the toilet door (on which step do you reach back down behind yourself to slip across the measly lock without falling drunkenly back out into the bar or braining yourself on the side posts of the door) the damage was already done.

Really the best thing about the place is that it’s located in Fitzrovia and the fact that you seem to be able to get a drink whenever you want. Minus points are collected by the toilet’s bizarre construction and the odd drainy smell, which the regulars seem to actually find comforting (we heard them discussing it, no word of a lie) . Perhaps all the ad men that frequent it see the smell of effluent as providing that ”home from home” feel…

4/10 – needs more room for manouvre

The Royal Standard of England

Brindle Lane, Forty Green,
Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire HP9 1XT

Website

Did you know that The Royal Standard of England in Forty Green is the oldest free-house in England? You do now. It’s been a freehouse for 900 years you know, set in what passes for rural in South Bucks and serving ale since Saxon times.

Luckily the toilets don’t comprise a hole in board over a heap of fly-blown beer dung, so it’s perfectly safe to venture out into the wilds of Bucks for a swift pint, (but not the Perry, there’s something mysteriously sharp about it). No, the toilets are pleasingly all one would expect from a country pub toilet.

Flag-stone floors, white-washed walls, two good-sized mirrors, a real towel instead of a paper towels and an eccentric old dining-room chair placed outside one of the cubicles so that drunken wenches (that’s what they’re called in the country you know) can have a brief rest before staggering the two steps through the door onto the toilet itself. Or maybe so that mothers can wait outside to make sure that their daughters aren’t being “tupped” as I believe they call it out there, by a tasty barman or strapping young merchant banker (you thought I was going to say farmer didn’t you).

We were blessed to be partaking of a drink with a former cleaner of those toilets, a rare privellege in our business and we were sad to inform her that there was toilet paper strewn about one of the cubicles. We also felt that the coat hooks in the entrance to the conveniences were worth a mention, as we assumed that in happier, more innocent times customers would hang their coats there, but we were informed instead the coat hooks were for hanging the bodies of former detectives after going through the Wicker Man ceremony in preparation for the autumn Perry Cider festival.*

All in all the toilets are respectable though let down by the toilet paper on the floor of cubicle one but the touch of eccentricity can be set against that. But it’s worth a visit anyway, it’s the oldest freehouse in England you know.

 6/10

*We lied about the Wicker Man thing…. and the Perry festival.