George Whyte-Melville, the author of "Market Harborough"

Despite the presence of the ruined St John a little way out of the village, Boughton has a medieval church. St John the Baptist probably began life as a chapel for Boughton Hall.

Next to it is the village pub, The Whyte Melville.

It is named for the 19th-century Scottish novelist and poet George Whyte-Melville, whom I have run into a couple of times before.

He wrote many novels of the hunting field. One of them, published in 1861, was titled Market Harborough.

And around 1990 I occasionally played chess for Northampton Working Men's Club. They took part in the national club knock out championship, which was something the Market Harborough team did not aspire to.

The building where we played in Northampton was often referred to as "Whyte-Melville" because George had founded it.

Like so many such clubs, it has now closed. The premises are occupied by a pub called The Fox and Quill (which was previously the Goose on Two Streets).

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Six of the Best 601

"Like most wars, this one will end inconclusively with a narrow margin on a low turnout and the losers promising to keep fighting once they have regrouped and rearmed." Vince Cable takes a humorous look at referendum campaign.

Martin Hancox on the insanity of the badger cull.

A proposed new law would make it harder to criticise the ruling regime on Jersey. Voice for Children has the details.

"Reiner ends his memory with an envious observation: 'The word fuck is a perfectly good word now.' 'I never minded Richard Pryor saying it,' says Van Dyke, 'but so many comedians use it constantly instead of good material. That’s when it gets offensive.'" Katherine Brodsky interviews Dick Van Dyke and Carl Reiner, who are both past 90 but still crackling with ideas.

"If you’d have said that to us 50 years ago, that’d we’d be doing this still, we would have not believed it. That was the time Lennon said that he didn’t expect to be still doing it when he was 30!" Midlands What's On interviews Rod Argent from the Zombies.

Can you name the six London Underground stations named after pubs? Londonist can.

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The Line That Never Paid: Memories of the Bishop's Castle Railway

This treasure found on YouTube this evening combines footage of the remains of the Bishop's Castle Railway with the memories of people who remembered it in operation. It closed in 1935.

When was this film shot?

The 'Craven Arms and Stokesay' running in board at the end dates it to before 1974 and the first photo of the station without any buildings, as it appears here, dates from 1972 - see the Disused Stations site.

However, the start of the film shows the Six Bells in the town and it is a Wrekin Brewery pub. A story on the revival of the name says that brewery closed in the early 1960s.

I suspect that that early footage of the town is some years earlier than the footage of Craven Arms station at the end.

Whatever the truth of this, it is a wonderful find.

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The Black Boy, Albion Street, Leicester

If ever I find myself short of ideas for something to photograph, I have a look at the Leicester Mercury and see which building's demolition the city council proposes to allow next.

The latest candidate is the former Black Boy pub in Albion Street, which I visited yesterday morning. Its sign used to be a portrait of the young Charles II, which gives a clue  to the origins of its name came from.

The Mercury report about it begins:

Heritage campaigners have launched a fight against an "absolutely shocking" plan to demolish a "unique" city pub and replace it with student flats. 

Developers want to knock down the Black Boy, in Albion Street, to build on the site, but already dozens of objections have been received to the planning application. 

The pub, built in 1923, has stood empty for four years. 

Three years ago, Leicester City Council gave permission for a plan that involved keeping the pub's façade but using the building for flats for 50 students. 

But now developer Deckchair Ltd has come back to the council asking for permission to tear the whole building down to create a block for 76 students.

I remember drinking in the Black Boy and as Stuart Bailey, the chairman of Leicester Civic Society, says:

The original architects took a square site and created a curved building, which is very difficult to do. 

"They also made a beautiful, oval-shaped lounge inside with panelled walls and a decorative plaster architrave. 

"It's a most attractive building and there's nothing quite like it in Leicester. It's unique."

Leicester's mayor Sir Peter Soulsby is an enthusiast for major heritage projects, like the Richard III centre and Jubilee Square, and I admire him for that.

But beyond those, the city's heritage is largely disregarded. Remember the Bowstring Bridge and the Empire in Newfoundpool?

I get the impression that most Labour councillors would be entirely content if the city consisted entirely of newly built supermarkets and blocks of student accommodation,

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The Real Ale Classroom, Leicester

I spent yesterday exploring to pleasant suburban shopping streets in the south of Leicester. They were the Stoneygate shops and Queens Road in Clarendon Park.

Though the former has probably seen better days, there is something pleasing about finding quality shops set in a red-brick terrace.

One reason for going to Stoneygate was to try The Real Ale Classroom.

A write up in the Leicester Mercury last year began:

Two teachers have taken inspiration from the classroom and mixed it with booze to create a new educational ale house in Stoneygate. 

Steven Tabbernor, 40, from Clarendon Park, and Ian Martin, 41, from Rutland, are hoping to bring real ale-ducation to the masses with a new micropub set to open next month. 

The Real Ale Classroom, in Allandale Road, was successfully granted a liquor licence last week and now the race is on fit out the unit in time for Christmas.

The compact bar will stock a selection of beers, ciders, stouts, ales and perrys from around Leicestershire - as well as bordering counties - with educating drinkers on the finer points of locally brewed booze as its main aim.

I tried a bitter brewed somewhere near Melton, but they had just tapped a cask of Citra from Oakham Ales (actually brewed in Peterborough) so I had a taste of that too.

The Real Ale Classroom is like a smaller version of Market Harborough's own Beerhouse, which makes it well worth a visit if you are in Leicester.

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Vanished Leicester: Butt Close Lane

Copyright © Dennis Calow

Butt Close Lane is still there and is home to The Salmon, one of the city's finest pubs.

These buildings on the corner of East Bond Street, however, have long gone. They were photographed in 1965.

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Six of the Best 572

Mark Pack and David Howarth have published a second edition of their 'The 20% Strategy: Building a core vote for the Liberal Democrats'.

Michael Oakeshott is an important 20th-century British Conservative thinker. Aurelian Craiutu reviews his notebooks.

Richard Gooding looks at the trashing of John McCain, which helped George W. Bush win the Republican nomination in 2000.

Like Ray Gosling and Alan Moore, Jeremy Seabrook is a product of working-class Northampton. Here he writes of growing up gay in the town in the years after World War II.

"Robert Mitchum considers The Night of the Hunter one of his most impressive roles. Gentle, subtle and seductive, but deranged and psychotic, Mitchum’s character is one of the scariest villains in film history." Cinephilia & Beyond on the only film directed by Charles Laughton.

"It was while working on Time Out’s annual pub guide in 2000 that I heard the tale of the Camden castles. A reviewer claimed that there were once four Camden pubs with castle in their name – the Edinboro, Windsor, Dublin and Pembroke – and these had originally been built for navvies digging Regent’s Canal." Peter Watts gently explodes a myth.

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Six of the Best 568

"There is only one conclusion that we can possibly draw ... if nothing changes radically between now and 2020, Labour is headed for disaster." Public Policy and the Past tells it like it is.

Zaid Jilani argues that our celebration of Martin Luther King today is based on a simplistic view of him that passes over his more challenging views.

"David Litvinoff was, by nature and temperament, a wanderer between worlds: between the Chelsea set and hardcore criminals, between Soho and the East End, between the Scene and Esmeralda’s Barn, between Lucian Freud, George Melly, Peter Rachman, the Krays, John Bindon, Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger." Jon Savage reviews a biography of a central but elusive Sixties figure.

What makes music sad? Ben Ratliff tells us, with particular reference to the songs of Nick Drake.

Lynne About Loughborough selflessly investigates the Leicestershire town's pubs.

"Not far from London’s Euston station is a slightly spooky old derelict building. The former London Temperance Hospital on Hampstead Road." Flickering Lamps takes us there.

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Vanished Leicester: Sir Colin Campbell Inn, Havelock Street

Copyright © Dennis Calow

Havelock Street runs beside Leicester Royal Infirmary. This photograph was taken in 1969 just before the pub disappeared to allow the expansion of the hospital.

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Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, Nottingham

Today I visited Nottingham and had a pint in Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem. Sitting beneath the city's castle, it claims to be the oldest pub in England.

At the bar the locals were discussing cricket with a barman from Australia or New Zealand. All was right with the world.

Happy New Year.

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Six of the Best 562

There is still crucial work to do on the campaign to reform the pub trade, says Gareth Epps.

"Dickensian would not only be inspired by Dickens’s novels: in its alternating layers of melodrama and comedy, like the ‘streaky bacon’ effect he wrote about in Oliver Twist, its style would also be truly Dickensian." Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is literary adviser to the BBC series.

"The heritage minister, Tracey Crouch, announced that Clouds Hill, the tiny home of T E Lawrence , near Wareham in Dorset has been given Grade II* status," reports David Hencke.

Alwyn Turner introduces us to William Charles Boyden-Mitchell, better known as Bill Mitchell, and better known still as Uncle Bill of British Forces Broadcasting Service.

A Lady in London discovers Eel Pie Island.

"The churches of mostly rural Suffolk ... harbour a curiosity - woodwoses (literally 'wild-men-of-the-woods'), hirsute manimals brandishing clubs." Matt Salusbury on creatures that make Jacks in the Green look tame.

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My defence of underage drinking in the Leicester Mercury

I have another First Person column in the Leicester Mercury today.

Pub culture destroyed in a generation

The other day a woman in front of me in the supermarket queue was asked to prove her age because she was buying a bottle of wine and looked under 25.

She did so without fuss – maybe she felt flattered? – but the incident made me think about how much our attitude to young people and alcohol has changed.

Back in the old days – in the Seventies – I was able to drink in pubs from the age of 16.

I did not do it often, but when I did it was always as part of a group of friends of the same age. We drank beer and we knew we had to behave ourselves because we weren’t really meant to be there.

But if we did behave then our presence was tolerated by the bar staff and other customers alike. I even remember playing snooker in a working men’s club on the shaky pretext that one of our number’s father was a member.

That would be unthinkable today. Any pub that let unaccompanied 16-year-olds through its doors to drink alcohol would lose its licence.

The result is that those teenagers who are determined to drink do so alone and unsupervised. They don’t drink beer but spirits and white cider.

Figures say that fewer young people drink alcohol today than did in the Seventies. I guess they are all at home in their bedrooms mixing music and being stalked on Facebook.

But those who do drink are surely getting a more harmful introduction to alcohol than my generation did.

Many things have changed since the old days – since the Seventies – and pubs are among them.

I have to admit that, much as we wanted to get into them, pubs were pretty unexciting places when you did. They turned out to be full of old men in flat caps drinking beer.

Everything changed in the Eighties. Suddenly pubs seemed positively designed to attract underage drinkers. They became fun palaces crammed with Space Invaders machines and Malibu.

Before that happened I had gone off to university to do my student drinking in York. In those days Yorkshire pubs really were ruled by fierce landladies who terrified all their customers.

Last time I was in York those landladies had gone and there was a security man on every pub door.

Traditional pub culture, including the tolerance for underage drinking I benefited from, was easy to destroy. Now it has largely gone and it would be next to impossible to re-establish it.

So the lady in her late twenties in front of me in the queue had to prove her age and teenagers are drinking vodka in bus shelters tonight.

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