please note - reviews on this site are purely the opinion of site visitors, so don't take them too seriously.
Closed for good a few years ago. Now houses or flats.
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This appears to have re-opened in January 2009 but I haven't been in to review it yet.
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this pub is no longer closed and has been open a few months
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Walking up Woodbridge Road I noticed the iron shutters had disappeared from this pub. On closer inspection I was delighted to discover it has reopened and all my previous comments about permanent closures and flying pigs have been proved wrong. Would have gone in to see how things were inside, but I had my 4 year old with me and there was a sign on the door emphatically banning children ( good idea in a community pub trying to build daytime trade?). There were blinds behind the windows so I couldn't even peer in to see what ales might be on offer. Anyway it's great to see the Horse and Groom back in business and I hope it will succeed even without family custom.
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I went into the Horse and Groom a few days ago, and it was a lovely friendly atmosphere. It has recently been overtaken by new landlord and landlady. they have sky Tv, and a very up to date jukebox. they have their very own dart and crib team, with nicely prepared old fashioned food. not just frozen chips and sausages. etc. all in all i will be a regular customer.
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What a shame. I came in here when I lived round the corner a few years ago, as did my Dad just after WW2 and his Dad in the 30s. We all liked it as it served the function in ways fitting for each time. This just shows - the traditional pub is dead, largely thanks to government policies. How can it cope when supermarkets sell beer more cheaply than it can buy?
Now kids get drunk on cheap booze at home and go into town to throw up on and fight / shag each other.
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An application has now been lodged to convert this pub into 2 or 3 houses. The case against allowing this conversion is overwhelmingly strong. As the picture shows, the pub fronts directly onto one of the busiest roads in Ipswich; just a few metres away there is a busy road junction which is an accident blackspot, and on a daily basis queues of traffic form along this stretch of road creating a blanket of pollution. Any new resident would find their front room set in the midst of this noise and pollution. Many new flats and houses have recently been built in this densely populated area and a former allotment site, rich in wildlife, is currently being concreted over to provide 150 or so more homes just up the road, which in turn will add to the number of cars passing the Horse and Groom. It seems screamingly obvious that all these new residents- plus the existing ones- will need a community pub to act as a focal point for their community much more than they will need 2 or 3 badly sited new houses. It also needs to be pointed out that the owners of the site- someone called Bankside- certainly haven't owned the place for very long and would have a hard time convincing anyone who cared that they ever tried to run the Horse and Groom as a pub as opposed to having acquired it as a property speculation. The only alternative local pub, the Orchard, has been converted into a 'brasserie' called Creams which certainly doesn't function as a community local, so allowing this application would leave many hundreds of Ipswich people publess.
Given this case, it's clear the planning committee would only allow this application if they didn't give a monkeys about the local people whose interests they are elected to serve and were only interested in promoting lucrative business deals to enrich wealthy speculators.
So I'm confident they will throw out the application and force Bankside to run the Horse and Groom as a community pub or else sell it on to someone else who will do this. There's a pub in Cambridge called the Flying Pig- I feel this would make a good name when the pub is relaunched.
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Just prior to the smoking ban (which all you non-smokers claimed was going to reinvigorate the pub trade) Pubmaster/Punch Taverns quietly disposed of various pubs which had no obvious beer garden area to cater for the people who have actually been using the pubs for years. Now the results are starting to show. Just around from the Horse and Groom the Water Lily has been boarded up for about 8 months. Just down the road the Orchard has been turned into a 'brasserie' called Creams. Turn the corner again and the County has been turned into pseudo gastropub called the County of Suffolk. Both the latter are obviously struggling with their new identities and are sort of pretending to still be pubs to get the punters in. Now the Horse and Groom has joined the ranks of the closed and boarded up. Of couse both the Water Lily and the Horse and Groom are theoretically 'to let' as pubs, neither being easy premesis to sell off for conversion into flats. Meanwhile the Dove is still going strong down the road, but given so many pubs falling by the wayside so quickly it's hard to imagine what will be left of the real British pub in say 20 years time.
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Trad local with very good real ale and real conversation, with civilised pool and TV sports enthusiasm thrown in. Top notch.
anonymous - 31 Jul 2006 00:18 |
