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Magpie Despite – or perhaps because - the new anti-smoking law coming into effect within the next few months, the patrons of the Hop Pole – a Local’s, Yokel’s pub situated on the outskirts of Warrington’s illustrious town centre - are taking full advantage of the remaining time left. They light up their own particular taste in tobacco with such ferocity that foreign visitors could be forgiven for believing they’d accidentally stumbled upon a Cancer Research Establishment: “Roll up, roll up! Come see the depravity and desperation that is the world’s first Smoking Time Trial! Who will win? Who will lose? Who dies first, only the nicotine knows!” With ornate fittings deriving from the eighteen hundreds, a wealth of ostentatious stained mahogany framing the walls and ceiling and a bar straight from local boy Lewis Carroll’s drug-fuelled imagination, the room should be filled with customers accustomed with a particular era of sophistication –late 1800s to the 1940s – but unfortunately, it’s not. Rather than reflecting the opulent décor, today’s clientele are a closer tie to the nicotine staining that consumes all exposed surfaces. The weary faces of the unemployed stand toe-to-toe with the weathered faces of local shop workers; pissed-off factory operatives get close and intimate with pissed-on traffic wardens. |
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