Coffin fit

ARISKY undertaking even for the entrepreneurial (and engaging) Mr Tony Brookes, the pub known on Tyneside as The Coffin has had a new lease of life.

If not quite risen from the grave, The Central in Gateshead is very much more than a shadow of its former self. Restoration has cost over £1m, the pub fully reopened last month.

“It was in an awful state,” says Tony. “The response to what we’ve done has been fantastic.”

So it seems. “Aa’ve nivver been in the Coffin for fowerty year until last month,” says the chap asked directions on the way down from Gateshead Metro. “Now aa canna stop away.”

A chap on the next table is telling a long story about a Welsh dresser. Just when we think it’s punchline-time, it turns out he’s a furniture rep. Someone else reckons that Sting was in a few days back.

“Mind,” he says, “he nivver give us a song.”

A West Yorkshireman, Tony took a geography degree in Newcastle, became a Kleeneze salesman – a way, presumably, to brush up on his skills – then worked in transport and furthered his youthful passion for railways, real ale and live music. “My first job wasn’t very rock and roll,” he says, appropriately.

In 1995 he formed the Head of Steam pub group, its eight outlets mainly in the North- East but also on Huddersfield and Liverpool railway stations.

There’s also a pub in Durham, with which we weren’t overly impressed. Tony wasn’t too pleased with the write-up, either, but remained as courteous and as amicable as ever.

The Coffin, Grade II-listed and at the end of Half Moon Lane between the Tyne and High Level bridges, is magnificently reinvigorated.

Only the food remains average.

Built in 1856 and wedge-shaped at the front, the dead-end pub had broken windows, leaking roofs and peeling paint. Beneath the eaves, it’s reckoned, workmen found a heap of dead pigeons (and pigeon muck) a yard deep.

Now the bar has a great gantry of gleaming hand pumps – Red Shep, Wylam Angel, Devil’s Water from the Hexhamshire Brewery – those three (and doubtless more) immaculately kept.

A lengthy menu lists bottled beers from around the world, occasionally gets a bit carried away – “A premier beer in a class of its own when it comes to style and attitude.”

It’s probably not the attitude they have in Hebburn.

The ground floor bar is warm and welcoming, decorated with locomotive name plates, railway posters and other memorabilia. The spotless gents – downstairs, as in most London pubs – has a machine selling everything from Anadin to extra strong mints to, well, other things.

Upstairs are two function rooms – mainly for music; there are jive lessons, too – and, above, a newly created roof top terrace with views, inevitably, over the railway line. The river’s down there somewhere, too.

“I want this place to be Gateshead’s third entertainment venue, after the Sage and the Baltic,” says the gaffer.

An inexpensive food menu embraces chilli, curry, Mexican stuff and a puff pastry steak and ale pie with potato wedges. Soup was carrot and coriander. Carrot and coriander soup appears alliteratively to have been racinated in the national consciousness.

Nice touches also include a collection box by the till, familiar in all Head of Steam pubs, into which customers are encouraged to put their change. The company matches the amount and gives it to local and global charities though Tony, 62, particularly goes the extra mile – usually on his vintage Harley Davidson – for Wateraid.

It’s a vibrant example of what imagination and enterprise can achieve, the folk of Tyneside Coffin dodgers no longer.

OUR home PC has had a major arrest – apparently obliterating the lady’s third novel, my Northern League magazine and much else of crucial value – and was rushed, blue light job, to the computer surgeons in Darlington.

An early diagnosis put the chances of retrieval at 50-50. Call us at quarter to five, they suggested. “It’s a bit like leaving a child in a hospital,” said The Boss, not unreasonably.

Though intercession, intervention even, may have seemed appropriate, it was wholly coincidental that we stopped off for a bite of lunch – dinner they call it – at the St Mary’s Association club, at the back of Skinnergate.

Catholic tastes? Well, the place seems pretty ecumenical – secular, even – these days. No religious symbolism is visible, though a sign proclaims it an “attitude-free zone”. It is not, regrettably, a blasphemy-free zone.

The club’s welcoming, old-fashioned right down to the tinsel stage curtains and wooden armchairs, sells meals every day except Saturday for around £3.

Sausage, egg and chips was okay, but not what you’d call manna from heaven. The Boss thought her liver and onions “fine in a school dinner sort of way”. A pint of Magnet is £2.10.

Thus fortified, we spent the rest of the afternoon in a state of some anxiety. The news wasn’t good, something about the anti-virus software finally having given up the unequal struggle. All is lost. Soft, if you ask me, as clarts.

NO room at the inn, the last 5s and 3s match before Christmas – away at the Baydale Beck – had to be reversed because diners had bagged every table. The year turned, we went to see what the excitement was about.

Most suppose the Baydale to cling to Darlington’s western skirts, on the A67 out towards Barnard Castle. The menu proclaims it to be in Low Coniscliffe.

It wasn’t, truth to tell, the first choice for Sunday lunch. We’d quite fancied the Shoulder of Mutton in Kirby Hill, above Richmond. Not least because there’ve been reports of a panther in the vicinity.

“It’s been in the Sun, so it must be true,” said the elder bairn, clearly without need of further verification.

The Shoulder was having a post-Christmas break, the Baydale Beck flowed on – if not in full spate, then still pretty busy.

It’s a pleasant, little changing pub with a big dining conservatory at the back. Beers included Summer Lightning, which seemed a bit unseasonal.

The menu’s lengthy, laminated. What it lacks in invention it compensates in honest cooking and in value for money. The roast pork (£7.45) was akin to half a pig. Vegetables and roast potatoes were crisply cooked, the crackling well worth getting the teeth into.

The bairn enjoyed what he supposed “proper”

steak and kidney pie, his doting mum the fish with particularly good chips.

Puddings were chiefly proprietary – boughtin – the perky waitress required valiantly to recall several on-off combinations. Among those that remained was Malteser parfait, no doubt the pudding with the less-fattening centre.

It was disappointing, however, that after all these years the bairn was unable to respond to the paternal suggestion that a little more work might produce further improvement – a case, of course, of practice makes parfait.

His mum had blueberry and almond tart, the boy much approved of a generous sticky toffee pudding.

It was all very pleasant, though the boy remained disappointed that the biggest cat in the vicinity may have been the mouse mog at the pumping station up the road. He may earn his spores later.

For the benefit of the thousands anxious for the domino results, it should finally be stated that, unable to join them, we beat them, nonetheless.

…and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew which hairy animal flies over the jungle.

A hot air baboon, of course.