West St

After (or before?) Bridge Street, with its short skip to the drinking hole, we board the wee dinky train to West Street. You have numerous options: go to the Laurieston (again?), endure JD Binghams, go to The Lord Nelson, hunt down the elusive Kiloran, step back in time at the Star Bar or trek over to BarBaxt. In fact, you have fewer options than you might think . . .

Stop motto: 'Not in my name' - and for good reason.

This is a stop shrouded, nay shell-suited, in controversy. Many a Sub has come to blows over the true nature of West Street. In fact it reminds us of one of those jolly Orthodox Church schisms they used to have in downtown Constantinople circa 6th Century, when Belisarius and the boys used to resort to fisticuffs after a few pints of ouzo and a Bible reading. All the blood and swearing boils down to this…nearest pub or different pub (not counting Binghams - see below).

The nearest pub (that we would enter) is The Laurieston. This is the Purist choice. The different pub, realistically speaking, is either BarBaxt, the Kiloran or Lord Nelson.

Coming out of the station, you find some bridges to your left, a road in front of you and another road to your right. The road on the right takes you down to another bridge, behind which is the Laurieston. Pedants (and Chris Rea fans) may argue that this is the road to HELL -a purist hell which means forever going around in a circle. For is not the nearest station to The Laurieston Bridge Street? [A. Bore writes: 'As mentioned on the Bridge Street page, it may be technically acceptable to visit The Laurieston as your West Street pub, so long as you chose somewhere else (i.e. The Glaswegian) for your drink at Bridge Street. However you may take the view that as The Laurieston is next to the Bridge Street station, it is a Bridge Street pub or it is nothing.']

Directions to BarBaxt: It's over there somewhere. arm pointing left

(up Scotland Street 'til you reach Carnoustie Street then straight until you eventually go under the flyover. If you can't spy it from there, don't come crying to us.)

Directions to the Lord Nelson: It's over there somewhere. arm pointing right

(turn right and go down West Street, go straight through the first two crossroads and turn left at the third.)

(Didn't quite follow all that? Click here for Multimap's map of the area).

Or . . . you can make the bizarre (in our opinion) choice to head left from the station then take another left and continue on (and on) until you eventually reach the crossroads with Eglinton Street. You will then be faced with the sort of dilemma which was once the provenance of heroic sandal-wearers like Jason and the Argonauts - go left again and face the Scylla of the Kiloran, or take a right and find yourself in the Charybdis of the Star Bar.

The Lord Nelson

(123 Nelson St., G5 8DL. Tel. 0141 429 1783)

Opening Hours: 8.00am - ???

It is said that the owners of The Lord Nelson thought long and hard before deciding on a theme for their pub. Such possibilities as Wild West, Art Deco and Post-Industrial were considered and rejected before they finally decided on - Rangers Football Club. Okay so a 'Gers pub in these parts is not exactly original, but in fairness it's a nice enough wee pub - better kept than many of those on the Subcrawl and featuring a pool table closely surrounded on two sides by seating (too closely - we imagine that many a black eye or loose tooth has been aquired here as a result of close contact with a pool cue. At least in this pub it would probably be unintentional...). The pub is particularly notable for its early opening hours - viz. the splendid poster on the outside wall:

"BREAKFAST Plus PINT £3.50"

Here at SUB, we believe that, as long as it's not full of bigoted headbangers, a football pub is an acceptable port of call and is in fact part and parcel of the fabric which makes this city what it is. However, those who've had one footy pub too many, and are wearing stout walking boots, can always go the extra mile to BarBaxt.

If you've taken the long walk to BarBaxt, you should be fairly sober by this point as the long walk will have burned off about a megaton of alcohol molecules. The pub is owned by the son of 'Slim Jim' Baxter (if you have to ask who Slm Jim is we suggest you try anotherpub at this stop). We can't tell you much about BarBaxt as we have yet to visit it in its current state. However we were more than familiar with its previous incarnation as The Gairdner's Airms (see Pubs of Yore).

"Pub" that it not a Pub - JD Binghams ...hereafter known as JD Bigots. This is technically the nearest pub to the stop, but only the most crazed fool would actually want to go there. JD Bigots is an example of the worst kind of Glasgow pub - the sectarian pub. It nods allegiance to Rangers Football Club, though we doubt anyone of influence at Ibrox would want the club to be associated with this dive. (Before we go any further let us just say that there are Tim pubs just as bad, but none of them are on the subcrawl). When we visited it, the proprietor was touching up the red, white and blue paintwork. A plaintive air was playing over the in-house sound system along the lines of 'my father was in the UVF and taught me how to hold my rifle'. After buying our pints from the misanthropic being (sharply sloping forehead and knuckles that dragged along the floor) behind the bar we took a seat and noticed a pile of pool cues on the floor. This was odd as the bar did not have any pool tables. Was what we were seeing a pile of 'chibs'? There were twelve of us on the crawl and three were from Northern Ireland (from both sides of the "religious divide" as it's euphemistically called, including one brought up near the Shankhill Road). These three were not having a happy time, their sectarian antennae being more attuned to that sort of thing. We drank up quickly and left promising never to return. By no stretch of the imagination can we be described as politically correct, so believe us when we say 'you have to either have a death wish or to be mentally unstable to want to go to this shit hole'.

Time Warp Pub - The Star Bar. Some of us Subbers remember going past this pub as wee boys in the '70s (yes, we know . . .). Judging from the inside it hasn't been updated since - and was obviously a bit behind the times even then. A "reverse-TARDIS" effect is going on, as it is smaller inside than it looks from the outside, the majority of the seating takes the form of sofa benches lining the walls. There really is a feeling that you have stepped back in time, an impression reinforced by the food menu which, as recently as late 2005, offered a three course lunch for under £2.00. Sadly, chicken in a basket didn't feature on the menu, but the dessert option was jelly and ice cream - lovely. Smallish selection of OK beer.

Bermuda Triangle Pub - The Kiloran. For many years we believed this pub to be the stuff of legend - not because it was great but because we couldn't find it. The pub appears small and rather threatening from the outside,but is welcoming enough on the inside, although when we last went it smelt a bit like an old man's trousers. Full of Scotland football regalia - we imagine a few of the Tartan Army probably head here on big football nights (or just possibly they might go to Hampden . . .). One of the seats beasr a plaque saying it is reserved for someone or other (presumably a regular - he wasn't there when we visited, but we imagine he might be quite a big bloke). Beer not bad.

As you come out of the stop, walking past the low bridges to your left can be a sobering experience. Some years ago a driver of a "double decker" bus tried to go under these and sheared the top off his bus. A number of young children died in the resulting crash. If you look at the central bridge you may see flowers tied to the bridge support in memory of the young lives thrown on the altar of stupidity.

Pubs of yore:

For many years The Gairdner's Airms was our pub of choice at this stop. The toilets looked like they belong to another building i.e. one from the 1950s and were particularly memorable for the crap hand dryers and the tendency for the electricity to fail at just the wrong moment. The most "striking" feature of the rest of the pub was its extensive collection of pseudo-funny gardening cartoons.

Longer ago, when the world itself was young, subbies have also quaffed ale in such establishments as Cagney's and The Speakeasy. Whilst these two establishments had the virtue of being much nearer to the stop than the Gairdner's, we are not too sad to say that neither of these pubs is still in business. All memories of Cagney's have long since passed (well, apart from the tiles), but a striking recollection of The Speakeasy remains, during a winter Sub, long, long ago... 'Twas a snowy day, but this had not deterred our hardy band of subcrawlers - at least until we reached West Street, for there seemed to be no pub anywhere nearby (of course nowadays there isn't). Then one of our number noticed that what appeared to be a derelict factory shop was in fact a pub called (shades of F. Scott Fitzgerald) The Speakeasy. But was it open? Although at first the answer appeared to be no, we tentatively approached the hole in the wall it used as a door. We strode inside to find a large man (presumably the manager, but who knows?) and a small gaggle of locals who gazed bemusedly at us. For a few seconds, it was all in the balance. However, once we had made it clear that we were staying, they were more than hospitable. As the heating clearly wasn't working, they dug out an old three bar fire and plugged it in next to our seats. We drank our beers by electric firelight while a small boy (or it may have been a dwarf; my memory is not exact on this point) danced a jig for us. Happy days . . .