BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N:Green Dragon
FN:Green Dragon
TEL;WORK;VOICE:020 8667 0684
ADR;WORK:;;60 High Street, Croydon;CR0 1NA
URL:
NOTE:Let's start off by getting the Croydon thing out of the way. Croydon is not bad. Croydon is good. Croydon is Manhattan as imagined by Le Corbusier, full of alienating, brutalist blocks that will, if we can overcome our hatred of anything from the fifties to the seventies, become national treasures in several decades' time, when we finally begin deriding the Disney architecture of the current age. Leaving my prejudices at East Croydon station, I actually found it a very exciting landscape, with towerblocks rearing up from unexpected places, weird sixties murals erupting from concrete fascia and odd Blackpool lights adding a psychedelic tinge to such classics as the Nestle building. If Croydon is our Manhattan, it is a Manhattan before Giuliani came along and cleaned the whole thing up; slightly seedy, slightly edgy, the last place you'd find Amy Winehouse or Damien Hirst. It is a place screaming out for a properly metropolitan pub, and amidst the sea of tedious clone hangouts and (the horror!) a Nando's pub, in the Green Dragon it's found one. Refitted from some godawful chain pub past, the Dragon is a weird mixture of traditional and modernist: wooden fittings and big traditional tavern windows mix it with exposed aircon pipes, on-sale modern art and more plasma screens than Houston mission control. This is a pub that does the lot: food, a vast array of real ales (four on tap at any one time, plus two kegs behind the bar), mead, pool (two pool tables), games, quizzes and a pretty relaxed atmosphere to boot. Appropriately, it seems to appeal to a very mixed bag of people. Pretty large, with plenty of seating, it sets a pretty high standard both in beer and entertainment for the rest of Croydon's pubs to follow. It's a pretty safe bet if you#re in the  town centre to get your fix of the past of London's future.
END:VCARD