📍IRISH PUB OF THE WEEK; The Station House, Tottenham, N17

The Auld Shillelagh in Stoke Newington is the Irish Pub you take people to show them how good an Irish pub can be. Welcoming. Sexy. Independent. Actually Irish. It’s the PublicanEnemy Pub of the year two years running for flips sake!! Yet a mere jaunt away on the 76 Bus , you can enjoy the other end of the Irish Pub spectrum and visit one of the more savoury Irish Pubs I’ve had the pleasure to encounter -South Tottenham’s The Station House.

On a balmy Summers eve, from the outside the building looks positively continental. We come to watch the Champions League final, but alas there appears to be a clash with another long awaited calendar highlight – the Country and Western Karaoke Night. How to resolve this Kulturkampf , allowing both the continental football enthusiasts and honky-tonk aesthetes immerse themselves in their respective art forms simultaneously? The solution is obvious. Why , just let them both go at it at the same time!!So we proceed to watch the big screen football action with the sound down accompanied by the dulcet tones of Big Tom bangers, the pub thick with vape fumes and the glow of the myriad fruit machines. They are also showing all the GAA though , something they proudly trumpet from the outside. It cannot be confirmed that these particular matches are traditionally accompanied by the sounds Ethiopian proto-Jazz .

What of the pint? Tis nothing special, which is usually the saving grace of this type of establishment. The Station House could be a sister pub to that other similarly Spartan nearby venue The Yucatan, where they used to make you buy 3 pints on entry if there the North London Derby is on, and they shut the curtains so no freeloaders can look in , circumventing The System.

The Station House is one for the purists then, and not the kind of place you bring the Irish Pub virgin. Also not one for the split-the G- baseball-cap -wearing -cropped -leather- jacket enjoying semi-mulleted Kneecap listening Hiberno-curious. As its Tottenham-Irish flags make clear, this is a bastion of the local N17 community and for that alone, it doesn’t have ideas above its station.