The Lewes Arms, Mount Place, Lewes, East Sussex, BN7 1YH

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The Lewes Arms, Mount Place, Lewes, East Sussex, BN7 1YH

Address:
Mount Place, Lewes, East Sussex, BN7 1YH

Phone number:
01273 473152

Review:

There’s been a load of stuff in the newspapers, on Spy, and elsewhere about the Lewes Arms in Lewes and the successful 100-day picket by regulars. Greene King took off the Harveys bitter and replaced it with their own bitter. So the regulars stood out in the rain and explained the situation to potential customers, thereby turning The Lewes Arms into a ghost-pub. The company’s income plummeted (90% or thereabouts has been quoted), a senior guy at Greene King was finally ‘resigned’, and the Harveys went back on -- after months of bland assertions by GK that replacing the locally-brewed award-winning beer with Bury St Edmunds- or BSE-brewed Greene King bitter, was a superb idea.
Well I went in recently to see if all was back to normal. I liked the following:

* Pickled eggs on counter
* First class beer in pretty good nick
* Messages telling mobile phone users they must buy everyone in the pub a drink
* Brown everywhere
* Beautiful Georgian building with bend-down-low doors and ceilings
* Dark
* Dust
* Relative peace

Maybe I’m getting old but I didn’t like the following:

* Three young blank-faced staff, talking to each other in loudish voices about ‘Big Brother’
* Fake blackboards with fake chalk writing (OK, some good pub games on one of them)
* Less than full measures in your glass
* Too much fresh air and not enough fug
* A lot of emphasis on food rather than drink (is this a pub or a café?)
* The sinking feeling that the pub is on borrowed time

Long live them blokes (and girls) who fought for the beer. But Gawd help and save us all from great big ugly things like Greene King. What a shame. How about a regulars buyout?

Website:
www.lewesarms.org.uk

By Perry Stalsis at 21/06/2007 - 09:31 | 2007 | East Sussex | OK | Pub | Review | £££/$$$ | add new comment | 321 reads