Protz: Betjeman lives on

A few weeks ago my wife, a kindly and well-meaning soul, took me to the Champagne bar at St Pancras International to celebrate my birthday.

If you don't ask my age, I won't tell you any lies.

I'm not, I must confess, a great fan of the bubbly. The manner in which it is made, with the slight twist of each bottle every day to settle the yeast in the neck, is fascinating.

But the result is too much carbon dioxide up my hooter and a curious taste of toast in the mouth. I dutifully sipped the wildly expensive glass of Champers, and when Diana went off to shop - as always, there was an ulterior motive for our trip - I shimmied down to the far end of the station for a pint of Fuller's London Pride.

Both Fuller's and Sharp's beers are on sale straight from the cask at a bar called the Baby Betjeman. Situated outside on the edge of the concourse, it felt a tad cold for comfort.

But all this will soon change. Inside one of the Victorian red-brick buildings that form the station's main entrance, Geronimo Inns is building a pub called the Betjeman Arms. It's named in honour of the famous poet who worked so diligently in the 1960s to stop St Pancras being turned into a hideous clone of Euston Station.

A sign outside the pub-to-be promises a good British cask-ale range - and Geronimo tells me Fuller's and Sharp's will be regulars. The blessed Budweiser Budvar from the Czech Republic is also available on draught.

The Betjeman sounds worth missing a few trains. If so, it will be a diesel-fumed trip down memory lane for those of us who, before the days of the Thameslink trains from Bedford to Brighton, used St Pancras as the terminal for Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire.

For 20 years or more, the building that will become the Betjeman Arms this April was known as the Shires Bar. It was run by Travellers Fayre, British Rail's catering arm, and always had a good range of cask beers.

Travellers Fayre was keen on cask. It worked closely with the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) and I recall attending a meeting in the Shires back in the 1980s to discuss the possibility of serving cask beer on trains.

The problems were obvious. Trains move fast and there's a lot of Bill Haley - shake, rattle and roll. Cask beer, with a natural sediment, doesn't take kindly to movement.

But I remembered a famous Ealing film comedy from the 1950s entitled The Titchfield Thunderbolt. It told the story of commuters who saved a branch line in the West Country. One scene sees the actor Stanley Holloway, in charge of buffet duties, serving Ushers of Trowbridge ale from a cask on the bar.

At the meeting in the Shires, we agreed that the beer would have been "racked bright", without sediment. Travellers Fayre agreed to run an experiment on selected trains with racked beer - and suddenly delights such as Draught Bass were available to the suffering multitude on the 5.15 to Dorking.

The trial wasn't a success. The beer was bright, of course, but there were temperature problems with beer served from polypins on bars next to kitchens.

You couldn't fault British Rail for its initiative, but beer on trains has remained either bottled or canned since then. Now, from April, we can look forward to the real McCoy at St Pancras, where the Betjeman Arms will fly the flag for British beer as travellers arrive from Belgium and France.

I wonder if the new pub will attract some of the weird and wonderful commuters from times past? I remember one Saturday evening a curious young man in a long black coat and a trilby ordering a pint of Barbican. One glass of Barbican is bad enough, but a pint?

But just to be on the safe side, Geronimo had better lay in a supply.

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