O'Neill's, Wallington

It has to be said that off the six and a half pubs in Wallington this is the best one.

The Windmill requires at least eleven toes per customer , the Whispering moon although cheap , has no soul what so ever and is staffed by unfriendly and incompetent MacDonald�s rejects , the John Jackson is okay but still feels like drinking in a retail unit , the Dukes head has prices that will soon overtake the hourly rate they pay their staff , the Rose and Crown is patronised by drinkers who think abandoning their children in the beer garden whilst they spend the whole day in the pub drinking Stella is good parenting , the bar at the Grange doesn�t really count as a pub and the Red Lion ( no matter what the Royal Mail might think ) is in Hackbridge not Wallington .

O�Neill�s or the Melbourne as it has now been renamed , has reasonable prices , a good selection of drinks and food , a friendly atmosphere and live music nearly every Friday and Saturday night . Most if not all major sporting events are televised and when there is nothing on the background music that is played is actually reasonable, not the offensive noise you might find in many pubs in Sutton or Croydon. The staff are friendly and well trained keep the place running as smoothly as could ever be expected.

However there is room for improvement. When this pub was taken over by a new parent company they decided to give it an interior make over with frankly nauseating results. The front end of the pub now looks like a cross between a front room on an Essex council estate and collective vulgarity of every Blackpool BnB landlady who has ever lived. To say that the designer had an appalling lack of taste would be like describing the UK�s immigration policy over the last forty years as a mere oversight. A large part of the back of the pub has now been carpeted, which would be fine had they not filled the area with so much furniture that when there are any real amount of customers no one can move around the pub and the women�s toilet is isolated in the corner, it�s a good job they can hold it longer than us. Furniture is the one thing that does let this pub down, there is simply too much of it. If we lived in a world where most people were intelligent and considerate enough to move their chairs out of they way when they had finished using them, it would be fine but we don�t. We live in a world where frankly the general public are neither particularly intelligent or considerate. Chairs being strewn all around the pub is not just irritating but frankly dangerous on busy nights.

5 Apr 2011 15:41