Canning Town pubs

This place had intrigued me for a while, winking out cheerily from the Canning Town end of Barking Road while most of the other drinking dens either ooze menace or shudder to the colossal karaoke beats, a sixteen year old belting out the worst of Whitney inside. Charlie's Bar is indeed an odd beast, not really conforming to the usual notion of a domestic pub or bar. Rather, if feels like a re-imported version of many of the British bars in Costa del Sol; a sort of ex-ex-pats' hole, if you will. It has the same cheap and cheerful attitude, with white walls, brown tiles and decor not too far removed from the neighbouring pizza takeaways. The drinks are inexpensive and the spirit measures, whilst rather random in size, are always huge. In this case, it also seemed to be a big favourite with the local South American Indian community (all wearing England football shirts) which says something about the bizarre subcultual alliances going on in this part of the capital. The barstaff all have a robust and positive attitude, just like their counterparts in Spain, and I just can't get over the feeling that this place has such a sense of the English abroad that it seems totally out of place for it to be sitting on Barking Road. A copy of a copy of the original thing, but without the racism of its Costa facsimiles or the menace of the originals, I've got to admit that it's another sign of how things are moving on in the area. A weirdly positive experience. In my three years of living in E16, this is the first time I've been to a pub inside the district. The previous time I tried, there was a shooting in one of the nearby pubs ("He wasn't a regular", reported the landlord of that particular hostelry, "and we wondered what he could be doing here. Then somebody walked in and shot him.") and it put me off for a bit. This, however, is not a bad establishment. Fairly noisy, and with a loud jukebox(playing all manner of terrifying 'classics'), pool-playing teenagers and sport-watching interludes, it has a collection of regulars ranging from old Jamaicans to some of the local yoof doing quite good impressions of not being headcases. It has lots of windows and minimal furnishings, and quite bizarrely, closes an hour earlier than every other pub in the UK. I have yet to find out why

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