April 2026. Tyldesley. My GBG newbie is over a mile from the centre of Tyldesley, in an area of neatly kept old mine workers houses, pleasant if unremarkable. You’ll need to cross the A580 into Astley for the really interesting houses and the mining museum. Should you be cancelling your big holiday in Whitby or...

April (finally !) 2026. Manchester to Tyldesley. You learn a lot about the UK transport networks as a pub ticker. Some towns stand out as tough to tick, particularly the string of mining towns without a railway station between Manchester and Wigan. Thanks a bunch, Mr Beeching. But this very week celebrates a decade...

March 2026. Waterbeach. Waterbach Gault looked rather lovely last Tuesday. Less so, the contents of the skip we’d hired to clear muck from garage and potting shed. The house sale rumbles into its 15th month, quite the most stressful 15 months of my life. It’s inevitable, really, that everyone walking past a skip...

March 2026. Chesterton. Back down in Waterbeach, where Dad was looking better groomed than myself, and then a catch-up with Dortmund Annie to discuss “stuff” at the Haymakers. A possible answer to a quiz question, Milton (via Waterbeach) Brewery’s flagship is the only pub in Cambidge High Street, which is actually...

March 2026. Sheffield. We have more honoured guests arriving next month, so we used Sunday to do a risk assessment on the nearby streets leading to pubs, starting with the toughest of them all. Actually, the Blake Hotel isn’t too bad to reach from ours, you just wouldn’t want to run up it from Upperthorpe half an...

March 2026. Norton. North Yorkshire.. Not THAT Norton, Dave If you include virtually contiguous (love that word) Norton as well as Malton the population is 12,275, I read that somewhere. Norton is very much Malton’s hidden away ugly nephew, even though it’s somehow bigger, and has fewer pubs. I head there now, via...

March 2026. Malton. North Yorkshire. Before I cross over the picturesque Derwent to my second pub, I must reflect on Malton’s astonishing pub scene. Ignore those grey Ps (unless in Wolverhampton); I make that fifteen (15) pubs for 4,888 people in a town mostly famous for cafes and bistros and hidden food courts....

March 2026. Malton. North Yorkshire. This won’t make a lot of sense to most of you, but my brain only really comes to life when I’m taking in new sights, sounds and smells experiences, which is why the repetition of those A1 trips from Sheff to Cambridge are so exhausting. But stick me on a train heading north-east...

March 2026. York. You might think the hardest part of the pub ticking game, the toughest in the world, is working out which one of the sods are going to deign to actually be open when you tip up. But actually it’s the logistics of travel, deciding whether to take the campervan to Guisborough or risk a bus trip from...

March 2026. Long Sutton. Lincolnshire. A couple of nights down in Waterbeach seeing Dad, eating Nepalese mixed grill at the White Horse, and trying to fathom out the new post box on The Gault. and then, like Supertramp, the long way home via Curry Charles and Dereham Spoons. Charles is in splendid form, though he...

March 2026. Heeley. Sheffield. Mrs RM couldn’t bear being inside any longer either, and on Tuesday we took the tram out east to the housing estates of Park Grange, with a view to Bramhall Lane and not much else. 20 minutes downhill brings you to Heeley, “beloved” of the Sheffield middle-classes for its organic...

March 2026. Sheffield. Sheffield is a great city but I can’t spend a whole day there. Mid-afternoon on Monday I headed down to the station, intending to bring you exciting reports from, I dunno, Retford or Adwick. But there was “trouble beyond Worksop“, and my sister called, and I abandoned my mission at the Rutland...