Trolley 760

A large M&S trolley captured on Station Approach on my way to inspect the fairly newly reopened Marquis. A bit awkward to wheel across to the top of the Kokoro Passage, and so down to the market square, but I managed.

Like the Wetherspoon's across the road, the Marquis appeared to have been expensively decorated, rather than significantly remodelled, front garden and side smoking den apart. A nice paint job, without much disturbing the cluttered - but pleasant - interior. The bar, for example, has not been remodelled. But the side smoking den has been enclosed with windows, rather in the way of the front dining area of Cappadocia just along the way, and is now just another area for fine dining. But there did appear to be ash trays on the tables in the now more-enclosed front garden.

A low-tech food menu, offering much the same sort of thing as other houses, if not arranged in little boxes on a piece of coloured A3 card. The drinks menu, however, was rather more elaborate, coming as a little A5 book with plush hard covers.

The whole baked sour dough and the flowers on the tables combined to remind me that the place was a Mitchells and Butlers house and I was surprised to find this morning, at reference 2, how many of them we have in the Epsom area. Including, for example, a second Toby Carvery in Worcester Park.

The flowers were pale yellow rose buds, rather than the alstroemeria I first noticed in a pub at Ealing, as reported at reference 4. This last being a flower that got locked-down in the brain as a result of passing some at the top of Ruxley Lane, on the precursor to the Jubilee Way run, more than four years ago now, during the plague. See reference 5.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/trolley-759.html.

Reference 2: https://www.mbplc.com/find-a-pub/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstroemeria.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/06/ealing.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/05/ruxley-lane-anti-clockwise.html.

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