Reviews of things tend to include a variety of information about different aspects of the experience reviewed. A food review would look into ambience, taste, appearance, wine, décor, price, serving etiquette and so on. Film reviews care about dialogue, soundtrack, acting, plot and the like.

A good pub review should also look at ambience, but also drinks on offer, price, snacks and food, and entertainment options. Difficult then to effectively review a place if the only notes you made were;

“Bank notes on wall behind the bar.”

“Far away wall has foreign money on it.”

“Odd array of not English pounds on the wall.”

Hard to embellish on this really, but maybe that serves as its own review.

Yes, technically, this is a pub. It sells beer and crisps and it’s cheap because it is Sam Smith’s. It was pouring when we went and everyone was doing that funny lip-rasping thing they do when they come in from the rain. There was a warm orange glow about the place and everyone was drinking merrily.

But it’s difficult to say much more. It was and is a pub by traditional definition. But to me this is no more than a room with a beer pump and a handily attached room with somewhere to make toilet. It feels more like a social club or one of those bleak function rooms you get at village cricket pitches.

A relatively weak attempt at character or individualism has been made with the bank notes, but it’s pretty forlorn. For starters, every third pub in Britain does this. For main course, it doesn’t really work if you’ve only about half a dozen notes and you’ve arranged them like some sort of Primary School histogram. And for pudding, it definitely doesn’t work if you only go to Europe for your jollies because all the notes have been the same since 2002. Broken down, what they’ve actually done here is pin the contents of their wallet to the wall.

If it hadn’t been raining I don’t think we’d have gone in this pub, and I wouldn’t recommend that you do either.

End of review.