HUNTING down a decent boozer around Piccadilly Station ain't easy.
According the their website blurb, the Tap's 'have no affiliation with any breweries and are therefore free to focus on the selecting the best beers possible'. Sounds good to us.
There's the 'ole Bulls Head on London Road of course, the Star and Garter only seems to open when there's a full moon, and then... well.. you're pretty shafted 'til you reach Northern Quarter or The Village.
So when we got wind a few weeks back that Bloomsbury Leisure - the group behind fantastic station pubs The Sheffield Tap and The Euston Tap (pictured above) - were eyeing up a site near Piccadilly, we fetched the pewter tankards down from the loft and gave 'em a spit shine.
Now the licence application for the new propa' station pub - to be called The Piccadilly Tap - has been submitted to the council's licensing committee. A decision should be made before 2015.
Gateway House OR the 'Lazy S' building
Should the licence be granted, The Piccadilly Tap will occupy 8 Gateway House on the Piccadilly Station approach. Yep, that 'orrible dingy grey drag populated by E-cigarette and pasty shops on the trudge up to Piccadilly Station.
The Euston Tap's Grade II-listed Portland Stone Lodge it certainly ain't, and with HS2 on the doorstop you do wonder how long Gateway House has before coming down - even if LaSalle did purchase the building this summer for £26m (there's murmurs of a 180-bed StayCity aparthotel for the building).
Euston Tap and obligatory beardy flatcap fella
Still, it's whats on the inside that counts, and if the Piccadilly Tap matches up with Euston's handsome fit-out and beer offering - with twenty on keg, eight more rotating cask ales plus 150 bottled beers - the pub's veneer matters not.
According the their website blurb, the Tap's 'have no affiliation with any breweries and are therefore free to focus on the selecting the best beers possible'.
Sounds good to us.
And with licensed hours running from 10.30am to midnight, we imagine travelling by train is about to become that bit more expensive. Why? We expect to be missing a train or two...
