Viva Brighton Issue #82 December 2019

BITS AND PUBS
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PUB: THE QUEENSBURY ARMS
No article about The Queensbury Arms would
be complete without mention of the (surely
apocryphal) story behind its nickname, ‘The
Hole in the Wall’.
I already know the tale, but the pleasant barman,
who isn’t bothered with much to do on the
Monday evening I visit, tells me anyway. “There
used to be three doors at the front of the pub,
and one of them had a kind of hatch through
which they served the local fishermen, who were
too smelly to be admitted inside.”
‘The Hole’, as the locals refer to the place, is
said to be the smallest pub in Brighton, though
it got bigger when the current owners took over
the establishment twenty-one years ago, and
converted a living room into the back bar.
They also got rid of the dividing wall between
what used to be – unbelievably – two front bars,
turning it from a traditional-looking mini-boozer
into something of a theatre theme-bar.
Punters from the pub’s past remember boxing
and horse-racing paraphernalia on the walls, and
the world’s tattiest fake Christmas tree. Now, it’s
decorated with scores of original posters from
West End shows, dating back to the thirties,
and signed publicity photos of yesteryear’s stage
stars. The décor colour scheme features various
shades of velvet-red.
The establishment was briefly rebranded as The
Hole in the Wall in the eighties, before reclaiming
its original name, which is etched into the
gable of its elegant façade. The first record I can
find of the pub, tucked away along the side of
the Metropole on Queensbury Mews, is in the
1877 edition of Pages Street Guide. The other
houses in the little mews belonged to fly-carriage
proprietors and their horses, and there was
a school and a small church – currently being
converted into flats – which served Brighton’s
French community.
It must, then, have had a diverse clientele, back
in the day. The evening of my visit there’s an old
couple in the back bar – a good place for a oneon-one
– and another fellow chatting to the barman
in the front room. I order a (decent) pint of
Guinness and sit in the corner where the famous
serving hatch used to be. It’s great to be able to
find such a quiet spot so near the centre of town;
a disco ball attached to the ceiling suggests that
weekend nights might be rather wilder. And I
understand that on Saturday afternoons you
can partake in a game of ‘Camp Bingo’, which
sounds like a riot.
Alex Leith
Illustration by Jay Collins
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