What next for Quinn’s?

Kentish Town’s beer revolution – our Pub Spring, if you like – has thrown something into sharp relief for me. The pub I’ve favoured for 20 years no longer seems quite as attractive a proposition as it used to.

That pub is Quinn’s. It’s been in the hands of the Quinn family since the late 80s, and it’s one of the rocks of southern Kentish Town: immutable and unchanging in the face of upheaval in other parts of the area. And there’s the problem.

Quinn’s is an important site: it occupies one of the busiest corners in Kentish Town, meaning it’s almost impossible not to know of its existence if you ever come up or down Kentish Town Road. That guarantees it a good flow of passing trade, but maybe it’s also offered a security blanket against change.

It was last refurbished in summer 2000, and these days its furnishings feel very tired indeed. Its legendary range of German beers is still impressive, though maybe not quite as wide-ranging and ever changing as it used to be. And in the absence, since 2007, of Kevin, the oldest of the three Quinn sons, and the one with the real enthusiasm for German beer, it’s hard to get guidance around the stocks to see what’s worth trying (worse still, the other week I was sold two bottles that turned out to be four months past their sell-by date).

Given that continental beer is taken seriously in Quinn’s, the pub’s attitude to hand-pulled English beers is puzzling. There are rarely more than two on offer, often only one. Kevin once told me there was no demand for them. That’s changed, but no one’s noticed at Quinn’s – and as a free house, it could stock whatever it wants.

I guess it’s a question of waiting. Old Mr and Mrs Quinn can surely not continue running the pub much longer, and the question of what comes next awaits. It’s a huge site in a prime spot, and given the interest of developers in the Hawley Road area, there’s surely enormous money to be made from a sale. If the pub stay in the family, which of the sons will take it over – the absent Kevin, or Vincent, who’s been the de facto manager for several years now? And if it stays in the family, will there be the will and appetite to give Quinn’s the thoroughgoing overhaul it clearly needs.

More than a decade ago, the Time Out Bar Guide commented on the truculence of the bar staff at Quinns. I’ve never minded that: I’ve been a regular for long enough that I get nothing but friendliness. I’ve passed plenty of amusing evenings with one or other member of the Quinn family regaling me with tales, be it Kevin’s unlikely boasts of connections to the Nepalese royal family, or Mr Quinn explaining that he wasn’t sure where he’d been on holiday: ‘It was hot, and there were a lot of black people, so I think it might have been the West Indies.’

But the other week, for the first time, my Sunday night pint was drunk not at Quinn’s. I went to Tapping the Admiral.

I felt like a betrayer.

Words: Michael Hann