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.