The Piper, Kettering, Northamptonshire

'What's On' at the Woolcomber, Ise Lodge

Kettering town and its surrounding villages has long been one of the key areas for the traditional game of Northamptonshire Table Skittles. Sadly the commercial centre of town is now almost entirely free of the game, the now closed Three Cocks being the last pub within sight of the shops to have a skittles table as far as I can tell. Only the Alexandra Arms hosts the game now, and even the Alex' is set back a few streets from the commercial centre, deriving most of its trade from the surrounding terraced housing and travelling beer enthusiasts rather than the footfall of town centre shoppers.

To the north of the centre, amongst the faded industry of boot and shoe making, and the tightly packed Victorian terraced housing associated with it, is a concentration of social clubs and just a single pub where the game is still played, this includes the excellent Midland Band Club which has recently featured on this blog.

So when it comes to Northamptonshire towns, the best chance of finding a Skittles Table in regular use these days is in a post-war estate pub. It’s a kind of Doughnut Effect, with town centre pubs and bars chasing the latest trends in food, drink and entertainment, traditional, noisy, space-hogging games like Skittles, Darts, and even Pool are pushed ever further out to the pubs and clubs of the suburbs.

Now I believed I’d covered Kettering’s estate pubs pretty comprehensively on this blog. I certainly thought I’d been to all of the outlying venues with a Skittles Table, classic post-war or later flat-roof locals for the most part, last bastions of a pub-going culture that's rapidly disappearing almost everywhere. The only pub I knew for sure I'd missed was the Leather Craftsman, a slightly run-down flat-roof local on the Ise Lodge estate that I'd driven past but decided I could leave for another day. I blinked and missed it though, the pub closed for good not long after, the building soon demolished to make room for yet more housing. Yet another skittles pub gone forever.

More recently The Harlequin on the Grange Estate has closed, plans now approved by the local council to convert to a convenience store. I did manage to visit The Harlequin once, though I have to say there wasn't a huge amount to see other than the Skittles Table (below). Change is of course one of the few absolute certainties of the pub trade, so a revisit to Kettering's estate pubs felt long overdue, before I blinked and missed another one.

The Ise Lodge estate lies to the east of the town centre, well served by the Woolcomber, which I'm pleased to say remains open and reassuringly unchanged since my last visit some four years ago. Which is to say a tidy and well-run pub with Darts, Pool, and Skittles Table. Much as I like the 'Wooly' it was another pub nearby that I was particularly interested in.

The Piper's entry in a 1990 CAMRA Pub Guide
Note that there's no Skittles Table mentioned

The Piper is one of those pubs that I've shamefully neglected over the years. A popular pub with beer drinkers, located on the town side of Ise Lodge, and conveniently close to Wickstead Park though sadly not quite convenient enough to attract me more than once or twice over the years. It's a great traditional 50's two-room boozer, until recently run by the same licensees for a marathon 33 years, and a regular Good Beer Guide entry to boot, so why the neglect? Well unusually for a pub of its kind and in this location, it never had a Skittles Table... until now that is.

A pub like The Piper has always seemed to me to be a perfect fit for the local game, the right-hand bar, which is effectively a games room, has plenty of room alongside the Darts and Pool for a Skittles Table. Maybe the pub did have a table when it first opened way back in the 1950's. It seems likely to me, but in common with so many pubs built around this time, there's precious little to be found online about its early days.

It's taken quite a sad turn of events for the game to finally arrive at the pub, a nasty health scare encouraging longstanding licensees Garth & Sue Coward to finally hand in the reigns of the business and seek a quieter life outside the pub trade. New licensees have been running the pub for around a year now, and things seemed much the same to me when I visited. A group of thirsty workers, the lifeblood of pubs like this, were enjoying early-doors pints and a rolling round of games on the Pool Table. A brace of well-known beers graced the bar, and of course the new (old) Skittles Table stood ready, tucked into a corner of the bar adjacent to the Darts Oche.

The table has arrived at the pub complete with teams from the Mikado Pheasant, another estate pub that's already featured on this blog but only recently reopened after a spell in the doldrums. 'A' and 'B' teams play on a Monday night in the Kettering & District Skittles League, a seemingly healthy league of 27 teams competing across three divisions in and around the town.

So not all change in the pub trade is for the worse, and certainly the installation of a Skittles Table at The Piper, and the weekday trade it's likely to bring can only be a good thing.

Conservative Club, Barrow Upon Soar, Leicestershire

Barrow Upon Soar in Leicestershire's Soar Valley is probably best known for the impressive Plesiosaur fossil that was discovered by workmen digging a Lime Pit in 1851, the original, now catchily renamed Rhomaleosaurus Megacephalus, resides in Leicester's New Walk Museum. Villagers are clearly proud of their fossil, examples of which are reproduced all over the village (above) as part of a Fossil Trail that I didn't have time to explore. I suspect this may be the only thing Barrow is truly famous for, although it's position on the navigable River Soar is how many outsiders will have come across the village, and the extensive Lime Works are a notable landmark when viewed from the Midland Mainline between Leicester and Loughborough.

There is of course much more to Barrow than ancient aquatic fossils. The pubs of the village for example, of which there are a fair few. In fact Barrow Upon Soar strikes me as being a relatively small village that's slightly over-pubbed! Not that I believe anywhere can truly be over-pubbed if the locals are keen to use them, so let’s rephrase that as 'blessed' with good number of pubs and clubs, most of which I found to be very good indeed on a recent visit to the village.

So Barrow is a village that makes for a great afternoon pub crawl destination, even more so if you're up for the short walk across the River Soar floodplain (do check the tides first!) to explore the clutch of pubs in nearby Quorndon (renamed Quorn in 1889). Quorn village also opens up the possibility of a ride on the Great Central Railway, a preserved heritage rail line that runs from Loughborough, through beautiful Charnwood countryside to Birstall on the outskirts of Leicester.

We might expect that a Leicestershire village as comprehensively pubbed as Barrow would be a happy hunting ground for traditional pub games, indeed the Soar Valley area remains one of the strongholds of Leicestershire's unique version of Alley Skittles. In fact Barrow itself has only two alleys as far as I can tell, of which only one is in regular use for competition, the Working Men's Club in nearby Sileby being the only other venue for league play within walking distance. The fact is that many of the pubs and clubs in the area have lost their skittle alleys, the Blue Bell in Rothley converting theirs to a restaurant as recently as 2014 for example.

As it happens it would have been around 10 years ago that I last explored the village, penning a piece on skittles at the Soar Bridge Inn which is now probably Barrow's last remaining pub with an alley for the local game of Long Alley Skittles. Whether it gets much use for the game these days is hard to say, the pub doesn't seem to field a team in the local league anymore so perhaps it's more of a social venue now.

So for league play we must go to the nearby Barrow Conservative Club, which should be no great hardship whatever your political persuasion given that in common with almost every club I've been to in recent years it's impeccably run, and with a decent local pint and quality snacks too, though more particularly the kind of filled Cobs the East Midlands is rightly famous for.

It's at places like the Conservative Club that traditional pub games not only survive, but in many cases truly thrive. Cribbage, Darts, Dominoes, Skittles, and Snooker are all played at the club, Quiz Nights, Bands and Bingo keeping the non-gamers entertained.

Tucked away off North Street, some might say the club is appropriately located given that the building, whilst certainly tidy enough, is in truth not much to look at from the outside. I was keen to get a photo but I just couldn't find an angle that made it look anything more than it is, a modern red brick affair with a separate, and if anything slightly more attractive Skittle Alley/Function Room. So, somewhat plain and functional on the outside, but warm and welcoming within.

The Conservative Club Skittle Alley occupies space in a sizeable function room, the ‘Frame’ for the skittle pins a pockmarked steel plate set into the wooden flooring (right). This setup is increasingly popular for a game that would originally have been played outdoors (as it still is at some venues for the game in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire), or at best in a draughty outhouse of the pub. Comfort is more of a concern now, particularly for leagues that play through the Winter months, as here. Given the robust nature of a game where barrel shaped 'Cheeses' are hurled through the air rather than rolled along the surface, it surprises me that these indoor alleys don't suffer more damage, testament to the skills and accuracy of the players I'm sure.

Whenever I investigate Long Alley Skittles in Leicestershire it's almost always the Syston & District Skittles League that comes up. There's not much to be found about the history of the league online, sadly there rarely is for pub games leagues, but it's certainly been around for at least the best part of a century. Indeed I have a medal for the 1944/45 season of what was then called the Syston Skittles League (left). The much reduced 'District' league of today extends as far as Melton Mowbray in one direction, Barrow and Sileby in the other, with competition down to just one division of ten teams. This encompasses several Cup Competitions and numerous trophies for outstanding performance, such as Highest Individual Score. Reduced it may be, but the league is also a proud supporter of the local LOROS Hospice through generous donations from its membership.

Dukes Arms, Woodford, Northamptonshire

The renaming of pubs is a controversial subject, more often than not incurring the wrath of traditionalists and locals alike. I have to say that I'm not a fan of name changes, or unnecessary refurbishments for that matter. A lick of paint and a good polish is as far as anyone needs to go in my view, and as for the great British swinging pub sign, well these should be treated as heritage assets and either left well alone or sympathetically restored.

Needless to say I'm in the minority in this regard, and yes, I'm well aware that most pubs we might regard as 'unspoilt' have in fact been radically restructured at some point in their lives, and of course pub names have been changing for centuries to reflect local and nationally historical events. I just can't help thinking they did it a bit better back then.

There are of course many exceptions. Take the subject of this post for example, a pub hitherto known as The Dukes Arms, and prior to that The Falcon Inn, The Lord St John's Arms, and The Lords Arms before the appendages were amputated. Unnecessary change we might imagine, yet hardly unique. My own local the Royal George in Cottingham is known by all and sundry as The George, the now closed Spread Eagle in the village was always truncated to The Spread, and even the long closed Red Lion in Middleton was generally referred to as The Red by locals. What chance thirsty Woodford folk arranged to meet-up for pints at the Dukes Arms? Not likely I'd imagine, particularly given that abbreviating to "The Dukes" saves a few seconds of precious extra drinking time when opening hours were necessarily limited. In truth it's surprising that any 'Arms', 'Heads', or indeed 'Horses' have survived at all in pub names given that they're so rarely used by the locals.

The only truly acceptable change in my view is that which serves to revive a moribund boozer, or genuinely enhance local usage. Because a village local that isn't shaped by the quirks and interests of the locals to some degree, or indeed reflect the character and eccentricities of the licensees, can hardly be regarded as a local at all. Clearly The Dukes in Woodford is every inch the village local, and a remarkably busy one at that, or it certainly was on the Thursday afternoon I visited.

In common with so many rural and village pubs, the Dukes has had the custom of three pubs squeezed into one. The Prince of Wales and White Horse have both gone for good in recent years leaving the Dukes as the only pub in what is a fairly substantial Northamptonshire village. The Working Mens Club is also still going strong though, reinvented on a shiny new site as the village's Community & Sports Club. New it may be but the traditions of old have been maintained with two Skittles Tables in the well-appointed games room.

Long regarded as being the oldest pub in the village, the Dukes was probably a Phipps Brewery house at one time given that the pub still sports a Watney Mann Brewery 'George & Dragon' swinging sign. These are still quite common in the county, part of the wholesale rebranding of the Phipps NBC pub estate when the brewery was acquired by Watney Mann in 1960.

The pub is well and truly free of tie now, and with a glowing reputation for its beer range which is what drew me back to Woodford recently. In fact this post on the The Dukes has been gathering dust on my hard drive for a few years now, the games room photos below taken over ten years ago. A midweek pint on the way home from nearby Thrapston offered the opportunity to take a few more photos and wrap up a pub I knew would be well worth a revisit. 

The Dukes is one of many attractive ironstone pubs in this part of the county, as traditional a Northamptonshire village local as you could hope to find. The interior could perhaps be best described as 'eccentric' though. Quirkiness abounds throughout the pub, from the fabulous glitzy stage in what was originally the games area, to the opulent smoking shelter which comes with its very own wood burner, and a sprawling garden complete with a rare Monkey Tree! It would be wrong to judge the Duke's only on its eccentricities though, this is still a traditional village local firmly rooted in the community that it serves so well.

So the Games Room was moved upstairs several years ago, all the better to preserve the peaceful ambiance of the main bar area, reserved for village gossip and the quiet contemplation of The Dukes' numerous ales. Darts, Pool, and Northamptonshire Table Skittles rub along noisily upstairs, though how much of the play is competitive in leagues these days I couldn't say.

As you can see above, the fixture list for league play in the Islip & District Skittles League was busy enough in the 2012/13 season, with two divisions and twenty teams slogging it out through the Winter months. But as we all know, the intervening ten years have been ones of huge upheaval in the licensed trade, and even a cursory glance of the teams reveals at least two closed pubs.

One is the aforementioned Prince of Wales in the village, the other the Kings Head in Wadenhoe, a long-term closed pub that's currently on the market so will hopefully reopen at some point. Even The Dukes own 'B' team seem to have been scratched from the list as the season progressed, not unusual for a league, but perhaps a sign of things to come for a traditional pub game that we know has been in decline for some years now.

I do know that the Islip & District League is still going strong though having seen play quite recently at one of my closest Corby pubs The Domino, a welcome return of Skittles to the Town that I hope to cover on here soon. The Islip & District is now probably the most important league for Skittles in North Northamptonshire, covering an area centred not so much on tiny Islip itself, but one of the strongholds of the game in nearby Kettering. Long may it and great pubs like The Dukes continue in one form or another.

Midland Band Social Club, Kettering, Northamptonshire

It's been a while since I last explored the post-COVID pub games scene. It's not for lack of interest though, more the increasing difficulty and expense of visiting far-flung places and finding the pubs I'm aiming for are actually open! Pubs of most shapes and sizes remain a passion though, and rarely a week goes by that I don't visit a few in the course of a good walk or social day out.

It's noticeable that behaviours continue to change around pub going. Queuing at the bar seems to have persisted in the wake of the pandemic, much to the chagrin of some, though of all the changes it's one of the least concerning to me. More notable is the substantially reduced trade and trading hours during weekdays, lunchtime and afternoons in particular which just happen to be my favourite pubbing times. Levels of trade and relentlessly spiralling costs are dictating pub opening times like no other, because there's no point a licensee opening up, paying staff, lighting and heating a building, maybe even running a kitchen when there's little chance of covering your costs. It's long been the case that outside of towns and cities it's rare to find a pub open on a Monday, but it's now often the same for Tuesdays and Wednesdays, even extending as far as Thursday in some cases. The sad fact is that for many of us, pub-going has become mainly a weekend only affair, often by choice but increasingly it's necessity.

The lockdowns that blighted the pub trade during the pandemic have inevitably left a legacy of further decline in pub games participation. Many games that were considered too risky to play under social distancing rules were effectively removed from the bar, more often than not merely put into storage, ready to return to the bar in better times, but sadly the disruption to many leagues has had the effect of accelerating the decline of formal competition. Many leagues have shrunk, some even folded, and the games themselves have sometimes gone from the bar for good. All this and more has made the task of documenting our precious pub games traditions ever more difficult, and I'd have to say that the ever increasing cost and unreliability of public transport hasn't helped in this regard, in many cases I've simply been priced out of the kind of travel needed to do our national pastimes the justice they deserve.

There are of course plenty enough exceptions where traditional games continue to be popular, and when one falls practically on my own doorstep it would be remiss of me not to get back on the horse, charge up the camera, and sing its praises with a blog post.

Kettering sits close to the northern limit of the Northamptonshire Table Skittles tradition, yet remains at its very heart as far as participation is concerned, although you'd be hard pressed to notice as much on a visit to the town centre these days. Skittles Tables have gone in recent years from the recently closed Harlequin and Three Cocks pubs, as well as the heavily refurbished Market Inn, leaving only the Alexandra near the town centre as a solid and reliable Table Skittles pub. It's also a firm favourite for beer locally and happily opens throughout the week from early afternoon, midday at the weekend. As with many towns and cities, to find the local pub games you have to travel out to pubs and clubs in the suburbs and housing estates.

Equally popular for its great beer, and also conveniently open all day every day, is the Midland Band Social Club. Located a little way out of the the centre, it's just a short walk through Kettering's old terraced housing, and much of the town's remaining Boot & Shoe manufacturing heritage to the north of the town. As the name suggests, the club was originally established as a home for one of the town's Silver Bands in 1896. Back then a small outdoor Beerhouse served Northampton brewed Phipps ales, today the much expanded club might almost be regarded as a local 'Tap' for the nearby Potbelly Brewery, and the bar is perhaps second only for choice of ales to the Alex'.

In common with almost every club I've been to recently, the Midland Band is a tidy and very well run club with a fully subscribed membership. The bar area leads through to a sizeable function room, and at the back is a similarly impressive Games Room. The early years of the club are notable for success in Billiards and Snooker, as evidenced by numerous old photographs of successful teams and players. The Billiards Tables appear to be long gone from the club though of course Kettering is still in the spotlight for cue sports with the recent success of local professional Snooker player Kyren Wilson.

Latterly the club is better known for it's Bowls Club which plays on the Recreation Ground Green just across the road, and with a current membership of around 1000! Perhaps not quite so popular but well catered for nevertheless are teams for Darts, Pool, and that most local of Northamptonshire games Table Skittles which includes teams for Mens, Ladies, and Mixed leagues. All these games command their own discreet space in the games room, though hopefully they're not all played together given the noise levels, although it's notable that the Skittles Table sits in it's own netted cage so at least other players will be safe enough from flying boxwood cheeses.

White Hart, Bargate, Derbyshire

It's been a long time since I spent quality time in a part of the country where I could almost guarantee finding some serious pub games interest. My own neck of the woods was a banker for Table Skittles not so long ago, but whilst the game is far from being dead, certainly most of the tables seem to be gone from those pubs and clubs that survive, and the leagues practically invisible to those of us not actively involved in it. Whilst skittles as it's played in the West Country is one of the few that remains well supported, pockets of Derbyshire maintain their own tradition of skittles play with a measure of enthusiasm that's matched only by their enthusiasm for pub going itself.

Belper in Derbyshire is a town that's garnered quite a reputation amongst beer and pub enthusiasts, an area that somehow, against all prevailing trends, seems to actually increase in pub choice practically every time I visit. Belper is the pub town that time forgot, still awash with pubs of all kinds including many steadfastly traditional boozers, and populated by folk who clearly still love a pint in the convivial social atmosphere of the pub rather than home alone with a bottle or can in front of the telly. I love Belper!

Belper is also that rare thing, a stronghold of one of the most traditional of all pub games, Long Alley Skittles. Long Alley is a game played exclusively in the East Midlands, more specifically parts of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, and Nottinghamshire. The Derby and Notts version of the game differs in that it's often played on outdoor alleys in all weathers, and with balls rather than the unusual barrel-shaped 'Cheeses' found in the Leicestershire game. These alleys are often located in the garden or car park of the pub, Long Alley being a very different game to that played elsewhere in that the balls (or cheeses) are not rolled along what are often rough tarmacked or concrete alleys, but thrown full-toss at a point just in front of the pins. This image (left) shows a typical Derbyshire alley at the rear of the White Hart in Bargate, with the foot or 'Chock' hole, which players must keep a foot in when throwing, seen in the foreground.

The Belper & District Skittles League has emerged from the enforced hiatus of the COVID pandemic with two divisions of sixteen teams for the Summer season. This represents a fair bit of skittling at more than a dozen pubs and clubs in the Belper area. Undoubtedly this is significantly less than in the game's late 20th century heyday, however you're more than likely to find skittles being played, usually on Thursday evenings throughout the Summer, and it's a great spectator sport when not raining.

The White Hart in Bargate village is one of these, a solid locals pub that isn't actually in Belper but it's very close, albeit up a lung-busting climb of around a mile (hint: weekdays there's buses until late afternoon). It's worth the climb though for a number of reasons, not least of which is the award-winning beer range at the White Hart. A hop and a skip further and you're in another great beer pub the Dead Poets Inn at Holbrook. Just a little further still and you could be supping in the Spotted Cow, Black Bulls Head, or Hollybush, a tidy afternoon pub crawl by anyone's standards. Or you could just stay at the White Hart and enjoy the beer and chat, because it's a typically chatty Derbyshire chatty pub.

There's a somewhat noisy bar to the left, particularly when playing host to a midweek Darts match (above) as it was on the night we popped in for a few pints. To the right is what would normally be a quieter lounge, though this too was alive with the rattle and clunk of a midweek Dominoes match (below), traditional pub games clearly still very important to the White Hart.

But pause for a moment to admire the serving hatch at the entrance (left), a rare enough sight these days though Derbyshire seems to have more than its fair share. There's not a lot of room in this entrance to the White Hart, but these hatches are sometimes used to serve customers in what is effectively a third room for the pub. It's more likely that this one serves as a handy counter for the handful of tables at the front of the pub.

It's in the surprisingly substantial beer garden to the rear of the pub that you'll find the Skittle Alley, squeezed into a wedge of hard-standing below the grassy bit, which means the garden affords great views of the skittling action of course.

It's early days in the season yet, but the White Hart currently languish at the bottom of Division 2 without a win. In better known and better funded sports this might be regarded as the relegation zone. Thankfully there's no relegation from the second division of the Belper & District League, nevertheless I'm sure the team would appreciate your support.