There’s a bit more info on Britannia, originally brewed for the pub of the same name, here. It’s good to add ‘prestige beer’ to the list of euphemisms employed over the years for The Beer We Drink And They Don’t, along with premium, craft, boutique, designer and all the other favourites. The trouble with most bitters is simply their ordinariness, they get closer each day to the classless beer, hygienically brewed, massively advertised, and as tasteless as the fizzy concoction of the rest of the world, laughingly known as lager. Two independent breweries are left, Young’s and Fuller’s, and while beers from the large nationwide chains are deteriorating, some of them still produce good prestige beers like Worthington E and Whitbread’s Britannia.
It is still possible to get good beer in London. There was something in the air, in other words, which perhaps explains this very CAMRA-esque passage: The Society for the Preservation of Beers from the Wood (SPBW) was well underway and the Campaign for Real Ale was just wriggling into life. The 1966 edition has section on pubs which somehow avoids mentioning beer altogether. There are fewer contributors than in 1966 but some big names still appear, not least Sir John Betjeman and Bruce Chatwin. Conning your way into halls of residence for young women and stalking around the corridors harassing anyone you bump into is one particularly sociopathic suggestion. There’s an entire chapter advising blokes on how to ‘pull’, for example, which is supposed to be cheeky but now just reads as incredibly creepy. In general, the 1971 edition is more sex-obsessed than the 1966 and, by modern standards, pretty obnoxious in places. It was edited by Robert Allen and Quentin Guirdham and was a follow up to a 1966 edition edited by Hunter Davies with the slightly different title of The New London Spy, which we wrote about years ago. This ‘discreet guide to the city’s pleasures’ naturally contains lots of details on pubs and beer, not only in the section on drinking but also scattered throughout.