Tales From A Crowded Island

Watching the local BBC news on Tuesday and was surprised to see that one of my old drinking establishments had blown up. The Florence Nightingale pub was sandwiched between Burmantofts and Harehills, directly opposite the back of Jimmy’s. When I moved back up to Leeds in the mid-nineties I lived in Harehills for about a year and, unsure of the more dubious looking pubs closer to my house (I remember the Brown Hare, the rather grand sounding Shafetesbury and the Compton Arms), I would trudge down to drink in The Florry (as the locals knew it) for its more -ahem- cosmopolitan crowd and of course the nubile nurses who frequented the place.

There was this air of menace about the surrounding area, which in this pre-ASBO, pre-yob culture hysteria era, we chose to ignore and were never the worse for it. I remember being told by the people I was renting with at the time that The Fountainhead, another pub literally two minutes staggering distance from The Florry, had been the scene of a recent stabbing and may have been closing down. I was surprised to find therefore that prior to the gas explosion that blew The Florry apart on Tuesday, that it was it and not The Fountainhead that had closed down and was boarded up slipping quietly into dereliction when the blast happened.

One feels those slight twinges of middle age nostalgia when you see a pub where you sank many a pint boarded up, but to see it torn apart like that did sadden me, such that you will have to forgive any sentimental largesse that happens in this post. It felt like the pub had decided it would suffer the neglect no further and exploded in one act of final defiance.

I am of course forgetting the fact that the beer often tasted like horse piss, that I spent far too much of my meagre salary in there and that thoses nurses always ignored me, but I prefer my rose tinted beer goggles for this one. This was the pub to which Lee and Andy walked, already half cooked following indulgence at a barbecue, through the dodgy Burmantofts estate and amongst the sinister high rises of Lincoln Green to meet me there. It was the pub, outside of which, Lee and I first saw beer monster Andy spill his guts after trying to finish off an impressive final round before closing time (we spent five minutes cheering). Who knows what shite we spent hours talking about in there, but I am sure we put the world to rights several times over. I shall choose to remember the place like this…

Now it makes me wonder whatever happened to that other temple of my mispent early twenties, The Beer Exchange in Woodhouse.

S