Opening Times – Sept/Oct 2026

I’m very happy to say that I am now contributing a regular column to Opening Times, the bi-monthly magazine produced by Stockport and South Manchester CAMRA branch. For my first column, appearing in the September/October issue, I considered an in-depth discussion of the minutiae of the CAMRA beer-scoring system, but decided in the end to look at another recent concern of this blog: nostalgic evocations of the past in pubs and beer. Now read on… Here’s a pub scene, from a novel published in 1958 (Mary Kelly’s The Christmas Egg): The walls of the public bar … were composed, to waist level, of reddish wood. The upper part was adorned on one side by glazed tiles which formed pictures of pseudo-classical half-draped women, and on the other two … by plate glass with an engraved border Dark wood panelling, waist-height dado rails, glazed tiles, engraved mirrors – it all sounds rather contemporary (although the tasteful classical decorations sound more like the Trafford Centre). Features like…