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.