Beef burger and pint of bitter

Beef Burger and pint of bitter

11.60Gbp

3/5

Couldn't find the rotate button, soz

Righto, so today we have a pub meal; beer & burger. Had this beast after spending the week Mersey side, living the Liverpool dream. After a bit of a drive from Forest Row and a stop off including the aforementioned average Americano, we made it to Liverpool, where I had no reviewable food, until we had left and I had this burger and beer at a pub just out of Shakespeare country (Stratford-upon-Avon).

We stayed in a nice wee cottage on the site of Lord Levers mansion. The same place as some guy that won Big Brother had a wedding and Wayne Rooney once had a party. ANYWAY, Lord Lever is most famous for being the "Lever" part of "Unilever" who pretty much make everything toiletry. Here's a quick history lesson, from what I can remember,

The guys best known, socially, for building 'Port Sunlight" for his workers (kinda like Mr. Cadbury I hear), a nice wee village where all of his workers received a cottage, although also had to adhere to somewhat strict rules, otherwise they'd be given the boot. We/he stayed in Thornton Hough, a village he built for his managers, naturally it had bigger houses than Port Sunlight, unfortunately  these days it doesn't have a dairy to get a paper (although the breakfasts at the town hall arn't too bad)

Don't worry we stayed in a cottage, not quite the manor,

When Lever wasn't getting caught in controversy for using slave labour to harvest palm oil in the Congo, he indulged in Freemasonry, getting to one of the highest ranks, which presumably came with a pretty awesome handshake.

From the door of his manor he had a straight private road that would take him right to the door of his factory, I get a slight hint of elitism from what I've read, but he seemed pretty well looked upon for building places for his workers by my great uncles/aunts that lived around there so maybe he was OK.

All that said, he's probably be best know for sleeping outside, covered only by a glass roof on the top of his manor so he wouldn't get wet...

While we where staying in the cottage there was a bit of a mosquito plague, on account of being surrounded by farm land and constant rain. One night I managed to knock off 8 or so of them in a violent 1am rampage. Just in case you were wondering about my issue of bugs here.

the road was a wee bit flooded so I took a detour
through the road on the way back from a wander

Liverpool isn't a bad place but the pace is complete contrast to that of London (compare the atmosphere of Orkland to Dunedin). It calls itself the "European Centre of Culture", probably because the Beatles came from there. Liverpool seems to be all about the Beatles,their football teams (Everton & Liverpool) and maybe trips to the pub to get away from the missus and have some two quid pints.

As a place Liverpool seems to be in recovery mode. Once a great hub for UK shipping and a huge centre for industry (up to the beginning of the 20th century). Come containerisation and moving production off shore, there's a lot of abandon space with a bit of a rundown feel about it. Especially when heading out of the city centre.

the Liver building (said Ly-ver), named after a prevalent red weed.

To my surprise there is a place called New Brighton in Merseyside, all these years I figured New Brighton in CHC was named after Brighton (South England), but perhaps not. The New Brighton in Liverpool was eerily similar to that of East CHC, after having had a bit of money spent on it, it still felt depressing and isolated. Hopefully Liverpool as a city will continue to grow as it once did and not become another reflection of the New Brightons.

SOo this brings me to the burger. On the way back we stayed a lovely hotel, with a rather cool old, abandon(ish) church onsite, complete with grave stones. Unfortunately I didn't get a ghost hunt in, as it looked like the sort of place that could have a bit of a haunting going down, if my readings of Goosebumps are an accurately reflection of all things ghosty and monster-ey.

Owned by the Shirleys, apparently Shakespeare may have peed in the garden (so I was told).

NOW TO THE CASE AT HAND. The burger was OK. There seems to be a bit of a trend here for burgers to be a bit deconstructed, I mean, could that not have put the salad in the burger? Also the salad/pasta salad/caulslaw stuff seemed like it had been scraped off the plates of diners the previous night. On the upside it was a genuine 16thish centenary pub, with a low ceiling, dodgy flaw and genuine Crapper bog.

The other case at hand is the beer, which wasn't to bad. It seems the best beers I've had here are the ales, other that the fact they all taste a bit like homebrew, are fairly flat and are served room temperature. The cool thing is pubs here have different local ales from one to another on tap which gives me good reason to try out all the pubs I can find (I don't mean all, the country seems to have one on every corner, but yous know what I mean).

Anyway, it was an average meal, but kept me satiated until we made it back down to Sussex.