Aldridge:
Previous visit here.
The Elms The Crown hasn’t been anything to entice you for more than 20 years, when it did enjoy a brief time of having a tiny bit of class about it: certainly that’s been lacking for the last 10, as The Crown descended back into tattyness and continued the cheap carvery.
It’s been done up again, and, just to annoy the Aldridge “Village” locals, it remains not called The Elms.
We dropped in to see what has changed.
Well, half the car park is now outside seating, with the currently fashionable scaffold-pole tables, and hefty cable locks to stop the locals nicking the chairs.
Inside, there’s pubco-catalogue furniture, and a coat of paint. The carvery has gone, but the TVs with the volume cranked up in the bar have remained. There’s some cask ale, and a large selection of keg, but that’s about the only thing to be positive about; the staff seemed a bit indifferent, the place stunk of cooking (and not in a good way), and you had the choice of bored kids with their parents or the noise from the TVs. There was only one wine on offer, the others having run out, and essentially, it was still the same old place with a bit of turd-polishing.