Feeling Bullish
Words: Joseph Bullmore
During Wilderness Festival last summer, seeking refuge from the rain and the Old Radleians on the hip-hop karaoke stage, some friends and I headed to a pub in the next-door village of Charlbury. We did not require much. Just a roof, some beer, and an absence of mom’s spaghetti. A Wetherspoons would have sufficed. Or a mid-sized Londis. But as soon as we crossed the threshold of The Bull, it was as if we had died and stepped into a very personal heaven. Or lived and walked into a very decent pub. Same thing, actually, when your feet are wet and the candles glow at you through the low-slung windows like that. We had a good pie and a pint of something dark and local. We began to feel normal. We took stock of the crowd. There was a Clarkson by the braziers and a princess at the bar. A society model chatted with a former prime minister by the firepits. If you did not know much about The Bull, you might have thought you were still hallucinating. If you did, you’d just shrug and call it Saturday.
The pub, which was reopened in July, 2023, by James Gummer and Phil Winser – the pair behind The Pelican, in Notting Hill, London, and who both grew up near Charlbury – is a honeypot within the honeypot. It has acquired a devoted and particular following. Village celebrities and actual celebrities are treated as one and the same. They come not to see or be seen, but because The Bull is a very good pub. It is modern, in that it knows it has to be a restaurant too, to survive. (The food is stupendous and reasonable.) And it’s also old-fashioned, in that it has ancient flagstone floors, plenty of whippets, low ceilings and open fires, and is lit almost exclusively by candlelight. It all seems so simple: hulking ribs of beef, Guinness in plain glassware, little stools around wooden tables, very friendly staff. But it’s almost certainly very difficult to pull off. They could call it The Swan, if there weren’t already enough of those around: effortless on the surface; a concerted flurry of activity and vigour beneath the waterline.
It would have been easy to get this wrong – to go twee and chintzy on one end, or glossy and flash on the other. I think the cleverness here – and I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, mainly by the fire, often with a sausage roll – is that the team have drilled down into exactly what a pub should be in 2024; exactly what a pub is right now.
When I was a child, a pub was somewhere with fruit machines and scampi fries and Carling. A couple did okay burgers. There were some nice ones by the sea. Most had terrible loos. Yet, we prided ourselves on these institutions inordinately. (Ireland, by the way, has always done pub-pubs exceptionally well, and still does.) Tim Hayward makes the case, in his FT write-up of The Bull, that pubs are our brasseries and trattorias. And the thing about them, when you think of it like that, is that, for a really long time, they were rarely any good. And yet their buildings, their democratic ideals, their 18th-century inn heritage, their coaching-route cosiness, were unique and worth preserving. What The Bull has done, I think, is unite the good stuff from the distant past with the good stuff from the present day. It’s got to the marrow of the matter, and then served that marrow with hispi cabbage.
That’s the soft stuff – so soft and swaddling you could wallow in it for days. (The leeks, dosed with Lincolnshire Poacher cheese, are similar.) Here are the hard facts. The best table, in my opinion, is tucked away in the immediate left corner as you come in – you get pub hubbub with the same excellent restaurant menu. The best room is Room Six, which has a little attic-style bathroom with a woodburner at the foot of the roll-top bath. The best lager is Clifty’s Pilsner. The best time to come is early December (crisp and clear, with an exceptional circular walk around Cornbury Park), or in high English summer. The best pie is the beef and Guinness. And the best way I can think to sum it all up, really, is to say that The Bull is probably the single best pub in the country right now.
This feature was taken from our Spring 2024 issue. Read more about it here.
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