He put an advertisement in the parish newspaper at the time to boast of his expensive refurbishment, inviting locals to make use of the Lion’s “comfort and convenience”. Its owner back then was a Victorian businessman named Will Hetherington. Closer, the exterior reveals fancy adornment, carved stone, colourful glazed ceramics, Dutch gables – showy work done when the Golden Lion was pulled down and rebuilt at the end of the 19th century. Seen from a distance along Royal College Street, the building looks a little like one of those Japanese cat dolls that wave. The Golden Lion is a local landmark, a towering red-brick building with a double-peaked roof and a high, pronged chimney. One regular, his photograph kept afterwards on a shelf above the till, had been served a last pint by Mary Murphy before dying on the pavement outside his wake took place back indoors. They had hosted parties for weddings, christenings, communions. The Murphys brushed down the pool table before evening league matches and heard the grumbles of anyone who had lost a pound or more in the flashing Dream Machine. Their hands were on the taps of Guinness and Guinness Extra Cold, they signed the orders on boxes of Tayto crisps. In the eyes of their regular customers, the Murphys were the Golden Lion. It never much affected their lives at drip-tray height. The family had learned to be bullish about the passing of their pub from one lofty brand to another. “They had a habit of telling you everything afterwards,” he said.ĭave Murphy, the landlord of the Golden Lion in Camden, north London. Dave Murphy said the family usually found out about these events informally, over cups of tea, whenever a rep from whichever company then owned them stopped by. When Punch sold on a batch of the pubs it had inherited from Charrington to Admiral Taverns in the 2000s, the Golden Lion changed hands once more. In the 1990s, Charrington was absorbed by Punch Taverns, one of the muscular pubcos that were then coming to dominate the industry.
In the 1970s the Golden Lion was owned by Charrington: delicate tiling spelled out the name of the British brewery in magnificent celebration on the bar-back.
“I don’t think I found it too difficult.” And suddenly you’re nursing the drinkers,” Mary recalled, of the transition. Before remaking himself as a landlord, John Murphy, originally from Cork, had worked for years in London as a bus driver. Now Dave got to tell school friends he lived in a pub. Their previous home, in Holloway, had backed on to a prison. “The rep told us she had bad news,” said Dave Murphy, a solid, red-cheeked man in his 40s.ĭave Murphy was 11 in 1978, the year his parents signed their first lease at the Golden Lion, and moved the family in to rooms on the building’s upper storeys.
Admiral was the large pub-owning company – a pubco, as they are known in the trade – that leased the Murphy family their tenancy at the Golden Lion. In front of the pub’s eyelash-shaped bar, beneath a blackboard that, for as long as anyone could remember, had advertised a heavy discount on tumblers of Irish Mist, the family met with a representative of Admiral Taverns.
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