Beer, buskers and alarm bells

Follow @barhopcousins Father's Day or Bar Hopping Day as I like to call it...as this is the day I go on a little pub tour with my Dad. I've been taking my Dad on a pub crawl on Father's Day for as long as I can remember. We've been on some interesting sessions. One year I took him for a Gentlemen's Afternoon Tea in The Library in County Hall, we had a seat over looking the Thames with a good view of Big Ben. The best thing about this one, is that the beer was bottomless. Two hours of a steady stream of beers. Last year I took him on a mini pub crawl which started off with a Sunday Roast and a selection of free beers at The Brewhouse and ended with us going for Afternoon Tea at The Tale Bar , which is the famous Playboy bunny club in London. This wasn't as seedy as it might sound. Honest! This year's Father's Day was a bit more sensible...there were no Playboy bunnies or Afternoon Teas but there was a lot of history and characters. The Wapping P...

Follow @barhopcousins Winter is coming......you want to be ready! What better way to shield yourself from the elements by finding a cosy pub with an open fire. Here's Our Top 5 Pubs with Open Fires in London. If you try any of these, we would love to hear your stories (if you can remember them!), so please do let us know. Either in the comments, twitter (@BarHopCousins) or  barhopcousins@gmail.com . Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese – Fleet Street, London This Sam Smith's pub is my favourite winter pub, as I may have mentioned once or twice before. There's a huge fire place in the small ground floor bar. There's limited amount of seating in this bar but it's great! It's hard not to have a chat with the people sitting around you…so the place is very friendly and there's an amazing buzz. It's said to be London's oldest pub having been rebuilt after the Great Fire of London in 1666. Charles Dickens is known to have sank a few gins in a tankard here….s...

Follow @barhopcousins So here's our Top 5 pub crawls. We couldn't decide which order to put these in...so we didn't! If you try any of these, we would love to hear your stories (if you can remember them!), so please do let us know. Either in the comments, twitter or barhopcousins@gmail.com . Bristol Ferry Not sure if this should count as a pub crawl because we travelled between pubs by a small ferry. Perhaps a pub sail or float would be more fitting. However, I think this is one of the most unique pub "crawls" we've ever done and I strongly recommend it.  My cousin, a local, was armed with the Bristol Ferry Timetable  and a map . We disembarked from the City Centre with our all day travel passes and we managed to fit in 6 pubs and a pizza. My cousin calculated we could spend 30mins in each pub before getting the next ferry…this worked really well until the seal had broken.  After ferrying it around Bristol we went on to Motion for the Ru...

Follow @barhopcousins Looking at the timeline, this pub crawl seems to have happened a couple of years after the famous ones in  Bristol  and  Ireland . Not sure why it took so long to have one in London, maybe we had other commitments or perhaps just recovering from Bristol and Ireland. However, I do remember what my cousin said to me when I invited him to London for a pub crawl …"Make sure there's plenty of trivia!". Damn, I didn't think of that! So I Googled "London Pub crawl" and discovered the Charles Dickens one. As I added a few extra ones to this list, I called mine "The Historical London Pub Crawl". Borough Market All good pub crawls should start with food to help line the stomach (Hey! I'm a responsible drinker!). Some might say, that "eating is cheating" but to me this only applies half way through a pub crawl, not before starting one and definitely not after one. So what better place to get some food then to ...