The George


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Situated at the bottom of the High Street by the church and duck pond etc. this pub is just on the Harefield/Rickmansworth road (Bury Street) out of town, and by just I mean 20 yards!

If you have read other pages in the pubs section you will see that some have changed their names over the years, well this is one that not only changed its names but went totally off the rails in some sort of mid-life crisis.

For years it was The George Hotel, standing quietly at the bottom of Ruislip High Street with its bar and, I assume, letting bedrooms. It was a quintessential English place, you expected Jeeves to arrive from the back at any moment.

Then, in the early eighties somebody went potty. They decide to make The George Hotel in to some sort of trendy bar. The inside was gutted, old "proper" floors were replaced with thin laminated stuff, standard lamps with spots, Bach with .... well you can guess. But the people who did this had two more aces to play. They changed the name of the place to Sullivans and painted the outside lime green! This is a conservation area and the local folk of Ruislip went mad.

Hardly anybody went there. I did, once, to "We don't sell cider" Sullivans. I never went again. It did not last very long.

Now it is part of the Harvester chain of restaurants and has half decent floors, is painted cream (should have been either white or magnolia, but we will not go there) and is The George. I am not sure about the veranda at the front but I guess anything would have been passed to get it back to some sense of normality.

At the bottom end of Ruislip High Street near the roundabout and church. Turn down Bury Street, the car park is 20 yards down on the left.

Good, Sweeney's is five minutes up the High Street to the right and The Laurels is just beyond that as you leave, and towards better public transport links.

We went there for a meal and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. Starting with the bad bits, my table was near the door (so I froze as folk went in and out) and the bar, so it did not quite seem like a restaurant, otherwise no real complaints and those two could hardly be the fault of the pub!

Typical Harvester food but quite acceptable, plenty of it and the salad on the obligatory salad bar was excellent. All the staff seems on the ball, but they did seem to take an age to answer the phone.

If you are seated before 6.30 for your meal you get one third off the price of just about all the food on offer. (Correct as at date).

The pub side was welcoming but there were very few customers in it when I was there.

I visited here again in September 2006. The real ale has gone and the place has been done up around the bar area and the garden. I liked what they had done outside with a large "arbour" but on the same day I went somebody wrote to me and said they did not like the garden and the staff were less than "child friendly".

Still, I enjoyed my hour or so there, it was not busy and the fizzy bear was OK.