Relax after a hard days work with a pint at The Falcon – Clapham Junction

BY BILL LACY

It was eerily quiet. It was getting late, but I still expected to the place to be fuller.

There were more staff than customers, and just as I was about to leave the barman urged me to have another drink so he could cure his boredom.

My pint of Sussex Best arrived before I could say yes.

We are entering perilous times for hospitality – with the biggest squeeze on disposable income for decades and a Spring Statement that didn’t reverse the VAT rise.

To be fair, The Falcon on St John’s Hill, Clapham Junction is hardly a struggling backwater.

Not to be confused with a pub of the same near Clapham North tube station, it is a stone’s throw from the busiest railway station in London.

At other times, it is thronged with punters – a mix of commuters, office workers, tourists, ale drinkers and football fans. It really is for everyone.

A grand dame of a building, this Nicholson’s pub has a magnificent and spacious interior, adorned with wooden panels and stained glass. A falcon stained glass window – part of the crest of the St John family – alludes to the pub’s name.

The bar was so long it was hard to know where to sit.

At busier times, you could probably go anonymous for several minutes. But the curving, circular bar really is a showpiece feature – apparently it was once Britain’s longest bar (that accolade now belongs to the Bowland Brewery Beer Hall, in Clitheroe).

It boasts an incredible 18 hand pumps – although this number was to cater for volume rather than choice, and there were only about five or five beers on.

Beers are decent, but the choices are well-known.

But the surroundings alone are enough the justify a visit.

I sat at the bar just taking it all in, until a group of blokes in suits came in and the barman shuffled over, glad to do something more purposeful than wiping the same bit of the bar for the fifth time.

The pub is the perfect combination of spacious and intimate, with many private spaces if you don’t fancy sitting at the bar and shouting to have a conversation.

The back room is particularly attractive.

Strangely, I used to pay this pub no heed, walking straight past it on the way to the Four Thieves or, slightly further, the Eagle House Ale.

I just assumed that any pub right outside Clapham Junction station would be generic.

But this is better than a mere pitstop on the way home.

The Falcon, 2 St John’s Hill, Clapham Junction, SW11 1RU