WE LET THE PEOPLE DRINK

ALES OF THE RIVERBANK

If there’s a pub for all seasons … It’s certainly The Ship.

Your commentator remembers it fondly from yesteryear – not quite back to 1796. More like 1976. But times have changed and so has The Ship. Indeed this ship has probably been relaunched more than most other river-going vessels.

From a tucked-away ale house, hard by a very busy cement and concrete wharf to a locale for the jeunesse dorée of Wandsworth, Battersea and Fulham … that’s what The Ship has become. Maybe it should be called The Chameleon.

It caters for Londoners north and south – and (sadly) its weekend success is now reflected in the presence of ‘security’. As your commentator/correspondent would never dream of entering the portals of a bouncer-protected establishment the views that follow are inevitably based on mid-week experiences. When of course it does also ply a healthy trade.
Beers are proudly Young’s, food aspires to the current gastro norms … and its great skill is to manage to appeal to a very broad and disparate target group and to maintain their loyalty – whether they imbibe and ingest in the bright main bar or dine in the restaurant or snuggle in the cosy little bar or brave the bracing elements on the open-air terrazza.

But let’s stop for just one moment …. here’s a public house right next to a noisy, brightly-lit day-and-night operating Hanson-Heidelberg cement works with its incessant truck movements, with no easy parking, alongside London’s least aesthetically pleasing and currently unilluminated bridge.

The Ship defies the estate agents’ phrase ‘Location, Location, Location.’  It’s gone one stage better, one stage further …

It has achieved the even grander status of ‘Destination, Destinstion, Destination.’

Long may she sail …. and God bless all those who sail in her.

THE WANDSWORTH VOICE ratings:

Early in the week: 8 out of 10

Weekends: N/A

To see what The Ship has to say about itself:   http://www.theship.co.uk