The Hope and Anchor, Camden

Further to the view expressed immediately below this one, I'd like to add my own experience of this pub. I arranged to meet a couple of friends here for a beer on a recent Friday night prior to moving on elsewhere. Before leaving I decided to use the toilet, but upon walking through to the back room where the toilets were I found an oldish gentleman blocking my way aggressively refusing to let me through, at first asking for �2 to go through and then telling me there was a private party. The coin finally dropped when after a minute of arguing in disbelief he insisted I couldn't use the toilet as I hadn't been drinking there, which of course wasn't true, and I remembered that on the way in there was a sign on the door to this effect, but he chose not to make sure of this before refusing to let me past. Then one of the barmaids joined in, herself angrily asserting that they were 'only asking', when it was precisely because the gentleman who for all I know was one of the punters [I asked him if he worked there but had no answer] hadn't asked me anything in the first place that I had not unreasonably - and certainly in no way aggressively - tried to understand why I was being stopped from going through.

As if this wasn't bad enough, when I finally got through to the toilet there was an unfriendly-looking chap in there shouting angrily and sliding around in vomit which covered the floor and stank the place out. And on the way back I also heard the same gentleman telling a couple of other people trying to get through who had also been in the pub that they should 'p*ss outside on the street'.

They obviously have a problem with people queuing for the club next door wandering in and out to use the toilet, and being annoyed with these people is entirely understandable but that is no excuse for unreasonable or threatening behaviour towards people who have chosen to spend their money and who should expect not to be intimidated. If there is a real problem, the landlord or the brewery should maybe think about installing a couple of bouncers. Perhaps if this was a one-off I wouldn't have been inclined to post anything, but it seems others have had a similar unwelcoming experience, and also bearing in mind the lack of consideration given to actually keeping the precious toilets you have to fight so hard to use as a paying customer clean clearly speaks volumes about the way the people running the pub views visitors so I too will never drink here again, will tell my friends to stay away and advise everyone reading this here to do the same.

26 Feb 2006 20:08