Four pints and a prison cell

In which the Stansted Express delivers us safely, the hotel room does not, and Sussex Gardens redeems everything with real ale

There is a particular kind of optimism that grips a traveller stepping off a plane at Stansted, and it lasts, in my experience, for roughly one hour — which is, coincidentally, exactly how long it takes to get to Paddington. The Stansted Express carries you gallantly as far as Tottenham Hale, at which point you are handed over to the Victoria line, which today performed the extraordinary feat of being almost entirely empty. A Tube carriage with room to breathe is, for a Londoner, roughly as common as a sunny bank holiday, and I treated it with the appropriate reverence. A change onto the Circle line at Kings Cross, and there we were: Paddington, bags in hand, illusions largely intact.

The illusions did not survive the hotel. I had, in my head, been picturing something modest — a glorified B&B, all doilies and a landlady called Doreen. What we got instead was a large, unmistakably “proper” hotel, five minutes from the station, the kind with a lobby and a lift and a certain corporate self-assurance. The room itself was comfortable enough, and thoroughly, reassuringly English — cosy, a kettle standing at the ready like a small brass sentry — but it was also, without exaggeration, one of the smallest rooms I have ever occupied. Possibly smaller than a prison cell, though I confess my sample size for prison cells is mercifully limited. No matter. We had not crossed the Channel to admire square footage. Bags down, and the pub crawl could begin.

We managed four pubs, four pints, four different real ales — a modest itinerary by some standards, a triumph of pacing by ours.

The undisputed champion of the evening was an old friend: London Pride, from Fullers, poured exactly as memory insisted it should be. Each pub had its own particular charm, that unmistakable Englishness that no amount of French café culture quite prepares you for — the low beams, the carpet that has clearly seen things, the general sense that everyone has been sitting in the same seat since 1987. And the area itself, around Sussex Gardens, turned out to be a genuine delight: leafy, handsome, faintly posh, the sort of neighbourhood that makes you reconsider your low expectations of the hotel entirely.

We closed the evening as any self-respecting expedition should, with a large whisky by way of nightcap, before retiring at what passed, on UK time, for a reasonable hour — though my body, still stubbornly set to CET, informed me it was rather later than that. No matter. The room may be small, but sleep, thankfully, does not require much space.

— to be continued