London Inn, Charlton Kings, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

It's been a few years since I visited Cheltenham and surrounds for a weekend of pleasure and pints. Needless to say the pub scene has moved on a bit since then, but only a 'bit' so far as I can tell. Yes, there's a smart new craft beer bar and bottle shop on the funky Bath Road, and a similarly shiny new Brewery Tap near the rail station, but the town has already seen a craft beer bar fail, and the burgeoning micropub phenomena seems to have passed Cheltenham by up to now. Not necessarily a bad thing in my view given that micropubs are often the natural replacement for struggling traditional boozers rather than a welcome supplement to them. All this might suggest that Cheltenhams pubs are struggling that little bit less than most, and this may well be true. We've all been to pubs that by luck or design seem to have sidestepped the general decline in pub-going. Cheltenhams pubs seem to me to be as popular as ever with a loyal local crowd.

What has continued to change though is the steady, seemingly inexorable loss of the towns more traditional pubs, and often with it their traditional skittle alleys. Sometimes the result of a pub closing, more often though it's down to the creeping gentrification of the pub market that's happening almost everywhere, and the ever-present trend of chasing the (already saturated it seems to me!) food trade.

This is a longstanding trend of course, and one that I've noted many times before on this blog. The Brown Jug on Bath Road is a good case in point. When I visited some five years ago it had only just been refurbished, but the excellent skittle alley remained a firm fixture and the pub was very busy throughout the week with league and cup matches. Recently though, I discovered that the pub has been refurbished once again, this time the skittle alley converted to yet more dining space. A truly inexplicable loss of what was clearly a very well-used asset, and just the latest in a long line of similar losses.

Where once it was common for pubs throughout the town to have a skittle alley (sometimes more than one), with home 'A' and 'B' teams in both Mens and Ladies leagues, there are now just a fraction of the alleys available (albeit for a reduced number of teams). This has resulted in ever-more skittles teams being squeezed into a dwindling number of pubs and clubs. Hence there's often a log-jam of matches throughout the week, and a bit of a nightmare for those compiling the fixture lists. Now that the alley at the Brown Jug has gone, another half-dozen or so teams are either looking for a new home or will sadly, almost inevitably, call it a day. This of course, is how pub games eventually die...

So pubs continue to close or move upmarket, and alleys continue to disappear, but there's still plenty of interest in the game from locals of all ages, and plenty of teams still keen to play during the week. The Cheltenham Skittles League alone comprises over a dozen divisions for Mens and Ladies competition, added to which are several teams playing in Summer and Winter competition in the Cheltenham Civil Service Skittles League. But the fact remains, the number of alleys available, and the lack of commitment to the game shown by some local pub owners really doesn't reflect the demand that's still there from locals, which means the Cheltenham skittles tradition is becoming a less common, more specialist aspect of the pub scene. It's also being pushed ever further from the upmarket centre of town.

This shift of skittles to the suburbs and villages is sad and perhaps inevitable, but it's also clearly to the benefit of pubs like the London Inn which now hosts several teams, including of course some of those which have been exiled from their own 'home' alleys. Even so, chatting with the licensee of the London Inn confirmed that pubs in the Charlton Kings area have experienced a similar level of closure and gentrification to that seen in Cheltenham and elsewhere. Of the nine pubs listed in my 1990's copy of CAMRA's Real Ale In Gloucestershire, only a couple have actually closed, but of the four which are listed as skittles pubs, only one now remains. The Little Owl closed some years ago, and both the Merry Fellow and Royal appear to have removed their alleys in favour of the all-important food trade.

Of course dining is an increasingly important aspect of the London Inn's success, but thankfully it represents just one part of the pubs wide appeal. The current licensees have been at the pub for just a few short years, but have already made a terrific job refurbishing and revitalising what was a typically tired and neglected village local. The pub is now a proper all-rounder with a tidy beer garden to the rear, all the televised sport in the bar, and a quality food offering that's attracting visitors to the pub. It's also a proper Inn, with several recently refurbished letting rooms available.

I popped in early-doors Sunday for a pint whilst the staff were gearing up for the traditional Sunday Lunch trade. A scattering of locals were in for that other Sunday afternoon tradition, the televised football, and as Sunday traditions go, few are more welcome than the huge bowls of roast potatoes that appeared on the bar as I was mooching around with my camera. The skittle alley, which extends into the garden, is in use most weekday evenings for league matches, and in common with most of the alleys in this neck of the woods, it's smart and impeccably maintained. It certainly needs to be as this space also doubles as the pubs equally important function room.

The Old Crown, Wigston, Leicestershire

I've had a run of bad luck when out and about with the camera recently, arriving at several pubs with high hopes of great gaming interest, only to come away with nothing but the lingering taste of a slightly rushed pint. Partly it's down to it being that fallow time of year, the gap between Winter and Summer league activity when the pub games have been tidied away. In other cases it's simply that the numerous online resources I rely on for accurate information have not been adequately updated, or at least the all-important gaming aspect has been overlooked yet again.

I've also come unstuck on a couple of occasions with that perennial bane of the pub-goers life, the opening hours lottery. Not such a big deal in a town with plenty of alternatives, but a village pub that isn't open when advertised can be a bit of a disaster, particularly if you're using public transport to get there. Less troublesome, though no-less frustrating from my own perspective, is when a pub turns out to be a bit dull, and just not interesting enough to inspire a blog post. A restaurant in all but name with a skittles table shoved away in a corner out of sight, hardly makes a good subject on a blog dedicated to tradition and the pub as 'local'.

The day was heading that way for all these reasons and more on a recent exploration of the 'skittles zone' south of Leicester, such that I was on the verge of giving it up as a bad job and retiring to the local micropub (little gaming interest, but a guarantee of good beer at least). I decided to try one more pub on the way though, in the hope of third time lucky!...

The Old Crown Inn was already a failed visit from several years ago. On that occasion I'd arrived when the pub was open and buzzing with local life, definitely good material for this blog, but sadly the Skittle Alley I was keen to record was "...a bit of a mess at the moment, the season's over you see...". A great shame as the pub itself is one of the most traditional and relatively unspoilt in Wigston, a proper bar and lounge affair with beamed ceilings and décor just the right side of lived-in/scruffy for my taste. I liked the place. A proper village boozer of the kind I generally prefer to spend my drinking time in, so I aimed to return when the skittle alley was up and running, but obviously never quite got round to it.

So after an afternoon of disappointments, three cheers for the Crown. Not only open, warm and inviting, and with a decent Saturday afternoon crowd in the lounge, but a good pint too and newish licensees who were happy to show me the skittle alley I'd missed on my last short visit. A major change is the interior, the slightly shabby but pleasant one I'd admired first time around clearly hadn't passed muster with the pubs owners. The lounge in particular has been spruced-up, refurbished for the more discerning customer I guess, though certainly not overdone or spoilt as so many have been in recent years. So still a traditional two-roomer, and still very much a pub for the locals who regard the Crown as an escape from the more lively pubs in the village.

The local history society have suggested that the Old Crown is one of the oldest buildings in Wigston, built perhaps a hundred years before it gets its first mention in an 1846 edition of Whites Directory. There are numerous outbuildings to the rear, all contemporary with the main building, but the Skittle Alley is probably later. Though a relatively 'modern' addition, the skittle alley surface shows enough ware and tear from decades of enthusiastic use to give the impression it could be at least as historic as the pub itself.

Long Alley Skittles probably developed as an outdoor game in the East Midlands, indeed it remains so at many pubs in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, albeit that more and more alleys are being covered over or enclosed to some degree. All the pub and club skittle alleys that I'm aware of in Leicestershire are located in adapted or purpose built buildings, but the twin alleys on the village green at Thrussington in the north of the county couldn't be more outdoors, and perhaps gives us an insight into what may have been more common in the early days of the game.

Long Alley is of course a highly skilful game in the hands of experienced players. Nevertheless it represents the most basic form of all the surviving skittles games. For most of its length the 'alley' merely serves to define the distance of the throw, since the 'Cheeses' used in Long Alley are not rolled down the surface, rather they're tossed through the air. So the game can be played just about anywhere so long as there's a hard-standing area for the tall wooden pins, and a clear throw of an appropriate distance.

Long Alley has changed very little over the years, and retains much of the feel of an ad-hoc game played with relatively inexpensive equipment, and in whatever yard or outbuilding was available at or near where beer was drunk. The mottled flooring around the 'chock hole' (above) for example, is a common feature of Leicestershire skittle alleys, most of which are located in separate buildings to the main pub. When delivering a cheese down the alley, the trailing foot must remain in the chock hole until the cheese is released, but this does not preclude launching yourself down the alley immediately afterwards if that helps deliver more speed or accuracy to the throw. Of course frequent trips to the bar on wet evenings could make a smoother surface dangerously slippery, hence this mottled non-slip flooring around the chock hole.

Skittles in Wigston and the wider area of south Leicestershire is played in the Tom Bishop League. The recently concluded Winter League has two divisions, the Premier Division sponsored by local brewers Everards, maintaining a tradition which stretches back many years and was the standard for pub games leagues when most pubs were tied to a local brewery. Brewery owners have always valued the custom that pub games leagues bring, particularly on otherwise quiet weekday evenings. The Barrie Clarke Division is named in memory of a long-standing stalwart of the league.