Technique

A minute’s silence for Gloucester’s The Brunswick, please. The Park Road public house shut down this week after, it seems, all manner of business problems that are beyond my ken. Although I’ve supped in there maybe just once or twice in the past decade, I’m keen to doff my cap and acknowledge the passing of a place I spent many a happy evening in during my youth and young manhood. It was always packed at the weekends in the late 1980s and although it wasn’t quite ‘the scene that celebrated itself’, it was ever a decent crowd coexisting pleasantly and without menace. Like ravens at the Tower of London, an anti-fashion brigade of pool players inhabited the right hand side of the inn oblivious to the posturing of the bright young things in the main body of the establishment. The pool players were a fixture; perhaps they recently moved out and The Brunswick was immediately and fatally doomed. I have too many memories of this tavern to list here but the images are still vivid. I lament its demise.