This is the perfect thread for the following question: Who can recommend a good pub for cask ale within walking distance of Paddington Station in London? I will be there for a few days in July.
Well, this is a rather more perfect thread for the question....
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/planning-a-real-ale-trip-to-london-help-appreciated.672199/
But anyway.
Historically, west-central London hasn't been the best place for beer, but the short answer is the Victoria, a Fuller's pub about 400 yards from the main entrance towards Hyde Park - or at least what used to be the main entrance, I've not been since they started knocking everything down for Crossrail aka the Elizabeth Line, which should be opening (at last) in the next few weeks. Well kept beer and a proper pub (with an interior of national importance according to the CAMRA heritage list). See :
https://retiredmartin.com/2021/08/27/top-100-pubs-the-victoria-paddington/
Similar distance on the other side of the park is the Star in Belgravia (again Fuller's), one of five pubs in the UK that have been in every edition of CAMRA's Good Beer Guide, which is the CAMRA-member-recommended guidebook (also an app) for pubs that serve the best cask (in theory), as opposed to the Good Pub Guide which is a pay-to-play commercial guidebook.
https://retiredmartin.com/2016/03/05/last-5-standing-the-star-tavern-belgravia/
The other obvious guidebook to consult is Des de Moor's guide to London pubs, which has just had a new edition.
whatpub.com is CAMRA's basic pub database which is updated (somewhat erratically) by members but doesn't seek to judge beer quality.
Cask Marque is nothing to do with CAMRA and it's a bit of a box-ticking exercise for the big corporates to show they're Doing Something about cask quality, but it's more about a bare minimum and I don't know anyone who pays much attention to it.
It's worth emphasising that the average quality of cask in London pubs is quite possibly the worst of any major city in England - I guess it's a bit like in the US where you think of smaller places like Portland and Burlington as go-tos for beer rather than LA and NY. High rents tend to be affordable only by big corporates who don't have the passion to do cask well, and the nature of the labour market means there's a lot of transient employment where barstaff don't have the experience or enthusiasm needed for cask. It's so big that there are some gems among the dross, but you have to look for them.
Personally, if I see Greene King on the sign I walk on by - they've got a lot of pubs in London now especially since buying one of the big pub groups but the beer is pretty ordinary when it leaves the brewery, let alone once it's been in the pubs.
The quality of Fuller's pubs is generally pretty good - but there are exceptions, and of course you're limited to Fuller's beers which isn't ideal stylewise for my northern tastebuds.
Wetherspoons are not tied to a brewery and are the supermarkets of draught beer - they're cheap but I guess it's like buying your steak from Walmart, not the highest example of the producer's art but it's adequate and cheap. Their relentless focus on price means that the beer range is rather traditional - in US terms think more Willamette and Cascade than Galaxy and Sabro and they don't have pubs as such but repurposed commercial buildings. In some cases they are very dull but they have a lot of spectacular 19th-century banks etc, such as Hamilton Hall which is the old ballroom of the station hotel at Liverpool Street. Quality of cellarmanship is pretty variable, it just depends whether that particular pub has someone who givesadamn. And they're cheap.
Nicholsons are part of the M&B property group which is a big chunk of the old Bass estate. So proper pubs, with a slightly corporate/Wetherspoony/touristy vibe to them but they're generally a fairly safe bet if you're in a part of town you don't know.
If you're looking for "pretty" pubs then the CAMRA list of heritage interiors is your obvious place to go - London has a lot of spectacular pubs but they tend to be owned by corporates so the beer isn't always that exciting, and they tend to be more towards the Square Mile, particularly eg around Fleet St/Holborn rather than Paddington way.
https://pubheritage.camra.org.uk/pu...7571&range=2&perpage=100&orderby=distance:asc
But with all of the above, bear in mind that the critical thing with cask is always turnover, which is something that London does tend to have in its favour. You'll almost always get better beer from an "average " pub at 6pm on a Friday night than from a CAMRA-lauded pub at opening time on Tuesday - and sometimes the beer can be singing at 6pm and a bit lifeless by 10pm. It never hurts if you're in a pub before 5pm to have a look over the bar to see which driptrays have been used - or just go for the lowest ABV most "normal" beer, as nobody will be drinking that exotic garam masala-spiced barleywine during the day.
Oh, and if you have flexibility on dates, the big CAMRA festival is the
Great British Beer Festival 2-6 August at Olympia with hundreds of cask beers.
