Brown is, in my opinion, one of the most under-appreciated colours and it really ought to be given more praise. Many of the great things in life are brown; beer, tea, marmite, oxo cubes, soil, wood etc. Brown is warm and comforting like an old leather jacket, a well worn pair of jeans or Roger Moore’s deep mahogany voice (except in the later Bond films where the saucy scenes all induce a bit of mouth sick). So now I’ve set out my case for the wonder of brown I will proudly declare that The George pub is the brownest pub I’ve ever been in. It wins the Brown Crown.

The George sits right across from the Old Bailey on the Strand and is on the fringes of an area of London which is awash blokes running around in funny wigs and big cloaks; a bit like Harry Potter but with more bullshit. Subsequently the usual central London clientèle staple of mindless tourists wielding selfie sticks is diluted with a classier crowd which the pub is clearly catering to. No screens, no game machines, no pictures of the food on the menu; the absence of all of these things and the tone of the pub possibly also contribute to the holy grail of ‘no children’.

Heading inside is like walking into a room which is immediately familiar and you’re instantly at ease. Any doubts you had are washed aside by the row of nine real ales proudly lining the bar or by the big brown banquettes at the fore and aft of the pub. If you’ve had poor experiences with central London pubs in the past The George makes up for them all. Whilst I usually enter a pub to find my worst fears realised this was the opposite; inducing the same emotions you might have when you timidly squeeze out a fart which turns out is definitely just a fart and mercifully nothing more sinister (a bad brown) despite your lack of confidence in that fact prior to emission.

Staff were remarkably chirpy and served me up two very well recommended pints. Also lurking behind the bar were a decent array of bar snack items including sausage rolls boasting a very impressive meat to pastry ratio. On the whole everything is well priced too; less than £4 for each of my pints seemed pretty exceptional considering the location and most of the mains on the menu come in just over a tenner. However I’d feel a bit of a mug paying £7 for a sandwich unless it contained a slice of something endangered.

The only thing I was a bit put off by was the bank of plug sockets installed upon what can only really be described as a ‘breakfast bar’ in the middle of the pub. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to see in a well known tax dodging, coffee producer exploiting, small business ruining coffee chain* festooned with twits on Macbooks thinking they look edgy/urban/a bit like that horse faced lass from that programme about the four nymphomaniac sociopaths in New York. Pubs would do well to not attract those folk as they’ve spent all their money on knitwear or beard oil anyway and the rest of us hate them.

Regardless of the aforementioned ‘Twat Magnet’ I’ll be back here and I’ll look forward to it when ever I’m looking at something brown. But perhaps not when I see Gordon Brown ‘The Worlds Most Fiscally Incompetent Scotsman’; he can sod off and will never win the Brown Crown regardless of how much he might beg me.

*Starbucks