Hamish Champ: Hunting for the perfect pub

14-Oct-2007 - Last updated on 13-Dec-2011 at 09:13 GMT

Hunting for the perfect pub can be a hit or miss affair. Off the top of my head I know of some great pubs in Yorkshire and I'm aware of the location...

Hunting for the perfect pub can be a hit or miss affair. Off the top of my head I know of some great pubs in Yorkshire and I'm aware of the location of some wonderful hostelries in Cornwall. Plus I could drive you to a fantastic pub in the Highlands of Scotland without the aid of a map.

But howsabout finding a lovely little country pub for Sunday lunch within half an hour's drive of my home in South East London? Not that easy, as it turned out. Sure, you can drive around for ages until you find one, but what if you want to book somewhere in order to be sure of getting a table?

Seeing as all my pub guide books were way out of date - the ones I had at home anyway - I decided to try my hand at finding a suitable venue on t'internet.

Now I'll be the first to admit the world wide web is only as good as the stuff that people are prepared to slap up there. But you'd think with all the wonderful pubs that are bound to be dotted in and around the 'Garden of England', that a guide, one available online with lots of details and nice photos, could include some of them. You'd think.

Anyway, I did more trawling than a boat that calls Peterhead 'home'. I spent what seemed like an age on a variety of web sites, some of which were easy to navigate, while others, well, the less said about them the better. Perhaps the web search engine host types make life difficult for licensees, but details of even those pubs that were featured online were in short supply.

I found a pub eventually, and yes, it was 'lovely' and it was 'little', on the Kent/East Sussex borders. But in an era when everything online is supposed to make things easier I'd actually given up on the Modern Age and reverted to good old-fashioned 'physical' source material. The guide in question might have been years old, but thankfully the pub was still as good as it was back then.

So my message to great pubs everywhere is: get on the interweb thing and tell us about your pub in detail, if you can. There're loads of us out here just gagging to find you!