Google

Having failed to find the pub under my own steam, I asked a chap minding a fancy car outside the restaurant left in the snap left, to be told it had not been there for at least five years. A large and expensive looking restaurant, occupying the whole of the ground floor of the block it was in.

I remained unable to work out where the pub had been, which was odd as there are usually a few tell-tale signs. So next I asked a taxi driver in the rank in the middle of the road, and he was properly shocked when I asked him if he knew the area. But we agreed that had been a pub there, although neither of us were too sure exactly where. We agreed that the pub sign included the front view of a clipper, and while I thought the place might have been called 'The Montpelier', he got the name right. We also agreed that lots of the good things in life in London are vanishing.

Home to ask Bing, as per the last post. Then Google, with much the same result, although their picture, although of much better quality than that from Microsoft, is also much older, dating from 2008. Which suggests another project for young people wanting to hone their business skills: draw maps of London colouring them in according to the age of the pictures from first Google and then Microsoft. Write it all up, comparing and contrasting. Perhaps wondering whether Google know something about the future of Montpelier Street as a fashionable address which has not yet reached Microsoft?

Which reminds me of one of the down sides of getting goods which are free at the point of consumption: one cannot complain about their quality and there are no service level agreements. Although I dare say both companies have service level agreements with the contractors that they get to take the pictures.

Thinking about it now, I think the pub has perhaps become a shop, with the front door staying in the same place on the corner. Return visit clearly indicated. Also that my memory of the outside of the pub had got conflated with that of another pub, once visited on a Saturday morning outing with sprog 2, possibly still to be found somewhere off Sidney Street, north of the King's Road. I remember that we played an early version of the aeroplane game there, it being more or less underneath a flight path.

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