"The Anchor" at Abingdon.

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the_wanderer

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Hi all.

On my last trip on The Thames I visited "The Anchor" at Abingdon. It is now under new management and is well worth a visit. The new people are really trying hard to make this an excellent pub. The beer is good and reasonably priced, the pub is clean and presentable and there is a keen young chef ready to serve you excellent food.

The new management are actively discouraging the yob element from that notorious road not far away in Abingdon from using the pub.

Well worth a visit. And by the way, it is now open all day.

Regards.

Alan.
 
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This used to be the closest pub to our house when I lived there in the 50's and 60's. Pokey and smokey but good for a game of bar billiards on a Sunday lunchtime.
Food in those days was a packet of crisps with a pickled egg.
The moorings just outside were notoriously shallow and rocky and many a cruiser ended up having to empty much of their gear and phoning the respective lock keepers for more water.
 
One of the problems in doing anything along that frontage was always getting anything passed planning. The iron railings along there were put in when my grandmother was a child and have even been copied when the need came to replace some after a car accident took some out in the 60's.
To put in a stage would mean having to have access up onto the walkway and 'elf n his mate safety' would probably give good reasons why not. The cost of dredging would probably be small, compared to the cost of underpinning the wall and footpath above the dredging area.....
Athough limited in traffic it is still a two way road even if access over the iron bridge over the Ock river a few yards away, is only one way.

Just some 500 metres downstream from the Anchor pub is where i used to live on the frontage. A terrific place to grow up. :)
 
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Insurance? Cost of pontoons?

Chris_d said:
If they are really trying hard could they get the moorings dredged or pay for pontoons, it would be a great spot to pull in for lunch.
Click to expand...

I have had a chat with the new people and they would love to put pontoons outside but the cost of insurance and indeed, the cost of the pontoons would need to be paid for out of profits. Its really not a reality in these times. The pub chain will not cough up for that.

Moor up on the meadow and use those funny dangly white things that hang out the bottom of your shorts to get you there. You just put one in front of the other and repeat.

Regards.


Alan
 
the_wanderer said:
I have had a chat with the new people and they would love to put pontoons outside but the cost of insurance and indeed, the cost of the pontoons would need to be paid for out of profits. Its really not a reality in these times. The pub chain will not cough up for that.

Moor up on the meadow and use those funny dangly white things that hang out the bottom of your shorts to get you there. You just put one in front of the other and repeat.

Regards.


Alan
Click to expand...

Thought that would be the case but worth a try, at the moment I reckon I could just get in there if I tilted the drives up, but unfortunatley the wall has 4 or 5 old wrecks moored there clearly just avoiding mooring fees, doesn't make the pub look very attractive.
 
As an addendum to this thread, my mothers family are/were the Stevens.
They owned the boat business on the Abingdon bridge island, before, during and just after the two world wars.
Unfortunatly, the young men were killed in ww1 and my mother never knew her father.
When her grandfather died she was too young to take over the boatbuilding business and run the cafe on the other side of the bridge, where the Salters steamers used to stop each day. The businesses were therefore divided between the men of the family when she was 14, my mother to have the family house as her inheritance.
Her grandfather built sailing boats for Oxford University in the 30's designed by Uffa Fox. He used to come and oversee the building and progress of the boats. They were kept at the boathouse at Abingdon Bridge and sailed down as far as the lock cut down Culham Reach. Mum remembers their names as Fairy, Elf, Gnome and Sprite. (I wish I had her memory!)

My mother, now 94, still tells me new stories of how she grew up there. She was born at Bridge House right on Abindon bridge (the new bridge not having been built by then) and so her growing up was done in and around the businesses. As a young girl, she used to spend most of her time with father and grandfather in the boat building side where they built punts. skiffs and dinghys.
In fact her father spent a lot of time building rowing eights too spending a short period in the USA building and teaching others how to build eights for Harvard University. I still have his first paypacket earnt by him when he was there and a silver cigarette case given to him when he returned to England.
During eights week and the bumps at Oxford they used to take lock fulls of punts up river through the lock all roped together and poled up all the way. These were then rented out by the Oxford boat businesses and a levy paid for the hire.
She tells me that she used to sleep under a tarpaulin in a dinghy with her dog all summer and it was her job to feed and water the ducks and chicken that were kept behind the boathouses.
 
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