18 November (Part 3) - Another Village Market and a new pub
There will be another market in Wilton Road, Abbey Wood Village next Saturday starting
at 11 a.m. (Click image for more details.)
Once again there will be a variety of food and gift stalls, this time with a Christmas theme.
Just
as there was in September there will be musical entertainment but in a
variation from that launch event stalls will be allowed to spill out from the
Abbey Arms car park into Wilton Road.
That expansion is thanks to Greenwich Councillors and Teresa Pearce MP who
engineered a way through the bureaucratic red tape.
The expectation is that there will be another market in March possibly on the
St. Patrick’s weekend which the Abbey Arms has traditionally celebrated; maybe
another before then but no plans made as yet.
Beyond March things are not so easy to foretell, through the Summer months anyway.
The closure of Abbey Wood’s last remaining pub has been deferred until the end of March and although the
Abbey Arms owners (Enterprise Inns) have been helpful over the use of their car park, its
temporary use for the storage of building materials cannot be discounted.
Once the pub has reopened in late Summer it should be very different. The
current landlady has rid the Abbey Arms of the image that kept me away from it
for 30 years but it still falls some way short of being upmarket.
Maybe it soon will be. The interior will be entirely ripped out and maybe
expanded to be reopened with all day food in mind. Regrettably not at
Weatherspoons’ prices apparently but priced at a level likely to drive the
remaining less savoury clientele away. Probably we can look forward to beer at
£5 a pint but somewhere nice to drop into when arriving home from a day out in London.
I did exactly that with a friend yesterday and there was nothing locally I would
want to go to eat. (I quite fancied the Taj Mahal but a food allergy keeps me a
way from curries from unverified sources.)