SMALL wonders, micro-pubs are big. The first, it’s authoritively supposed, was at Herne, in Kent, in 2005.

The second, the quintessentially quirky Rat Race Ale House on Hartlepool railway station, had to wait another four years.

Now there are hundreds, it’s reckoned – often in former shops, though the Micro-pubs’ Association is happy to embrace “a set of ethics rather than a set of rules.” Micro-pubs, it says, “promote conversation, shun all forms of electronic entertainment and dabble in traditional pub snacks.” There’s also a commitment to real ale.

In the North-East, where traditional pubs ceaselessly throw in the towel, downsizing is most evident on Teesside, on Teesside in Middlesbrough – though Stockton opened its third, the Looking Glass, earlier this month – and in Middlesbrough on Baker Street.

Darlington and south-west Durham appear not yet to have thought small, though there’s talk of a micro-pub in Barnard Castle and there are others in Durham City and Northallerton.

Baker Street, near Boro town centre though in what the 2017 Good Beer Guide terms the solicitors’ quarter, alone has three micros within 50 yards of one another.

It’s part of a renaissance – a gentrification, says one of the websites – which includes several hairdressers, somewhere offering advanced aesthetics, the Fat Dog Skate Shop and, doubtless appreciated by Elvis fans, a retro place called Disgraceland. Still some solicitors, too.

Sherlock’s micro-pub is so named because the Great Detective lived at 221b Baker Street, somewhere near Madame Tussaud’s. The Twisted Lip, a couple of doors down, is a nod to The Man With the Twisted Lip, a Sherlock Holmes short story about a newspaper reporter who could earn much more by begging. Times change….

Across the road, the Slater’s Pick might also have been a Sherlock Holmes story had Arthur Conan Doyle thought of it first.

What all have in common is electronic entertainment, chiefly low volume, though the chap in Sherlock’s offers to turn down the telly. It’s tempting to suggest that they might permanently relocate it, and its commercials for funeral protections plans, unspoken advice which might nonetheless be heeded.

Another barman says that the micros have a gentleman’s agreement to keep prices a bit higher, in order to deter what he calls the riff-raff. The Slater’s, where a pint is £3 40, may not be quite so gentlemanly.

Like all the others, the Twisted Lip is welcoming, food including a nice cheese soup served in a hollowed out cob and a moist scotch egg made with award winning sausage, no less. Reading matter is provided by a North-East listings magazine called The Crack, whose Newcastle address is Crack House. It could lead to confusion.

Between the three pubs there’ve been precisely six customers until three big lads saunter into the Lip. Between them they order two pints of lager shandy and a half of Duet Coke. Clueless, as Holmes himself may never have observed.

A final pint in The Chairman, in Bedford Street – next one down – neither small nor silent nor dabbling in food. The menu’s extensive.

No matter. compared to the great Gobi desert of Boro pub life hitherto, the micros are a little bit of heaven.

n The Discover Middlesbrough festival runs until November 2. Details on lovemiddlesbrough.com. The Orange Pip open-air market is held on Baker Street and Bedford Street every last Saturday of the month.

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LAST week’s note on happy days for former Sunderland South MP Chris Mullin reminded David Walsh of the perhaps apocryphal story of Mullins’ selection meeting in 1985.

Buoyed by support from the Boilermakers’ Union – “then a power in the land” says David – the new candidate headed down to the bar and ordered the lads 25 pints of Vo.

At once they wondered if they’d made a terrible mistake. In Sunderland it was pronounced Vawks.

Recalling that Neil Kinnock had supposed Mullins a “certifiable lunatic”, we’d also noted the leader’s view that Sunderland North MP Bob Clay was “a boil on the a**e of the Labour Party.”

Educated at Bedford School and Cambridge University, the ultra-left wing Clay spent eight years as a Tyne and Wear bus driver before his election in 1983.

By 2002, he was running a business called Roots Music, in Stanhope. Back then we reported that Shildon lad Pete Sixsmith had ordered a CD by post, became anxious when nothing arrived and was told that they hadn’t received the letter.

Several weeks later, Clay rang him back. Though the order had clearly been addressed to “Stanhope, Bishop Auckland” – 18 miles from Shildon – it had been delivered to Auckland, New Zealand, whence it was promptly returned.

“How wonderful,” said Pete, “that the New Zealand authorities know more about the location of Stanhope than those in south-west Durham.”

Bob Clay was 70 this month. Both he and his wife are now councillors in Swansea. The boil on the backside remains Labour.

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RICHARD JONES in Darlington plans to visit his mum in Tenerife next week and so checked train fares from Kings Cross to Gatwick.

The website quoted a single fare of £19 40, with the instruction to walk to St Pancras and catch the train there – so Richard checked the single fare from St Pancras to Gatwick and found it to be £7 90.

St Pancras is quite literally over the road from Kings Cross. It could be the most expensive 100 yards in history.

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FOR forgotten reasons, the column a fortnight back recalled that, within a few weeks in the swinging 70s, Melody Maker magazine had variously spelt Spennymoor as Spennymore, Spennymoore and Spennyworth.

The calumny continues. His email headed “Any More for Spennymore” – which unknown to him was also the title of a locally notorious porn film – Paul Dobson photographs the poster for the circus that’s in town next week. It talks of Spennymore, too.

So why was Melody Maker so attuned to Spennymoor? Readers’ favourite theory is that they’d have been talking about the Top Hat club – “unlikely but true, the premier night spot in the whole of North-East England,” says Wikipedia.

Perhaps best remembered thereabouts is the American singer P J Proby, who liked Spennymoor so much that he briefly became engaged to a 16-year-old pupil at Durham Road school.

Graham Carr recalls that he and Proby were neighbours on Parkside – “well known for his drinking and became a familiar figure around the town.”

Long teetotal and still protesting that his infamously split velvet trousers revealed nothing more erotic than his knees, PJ is now 77, lives in Worcestershire and continues to tour with 60s shows. Whatever happened to the damsel from Durham Road?

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….and finally, The Times reports much jollity at a recent meeting between the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury after Justin Welby, the former Bishop of Durham, told a joke that’s as old as Methuselah.

Basically it was the one about the difference between an organist and a terrorist, save that Dr Welby substituted “liturgist” for organist.

Pinched from Lynesack parish magazine in west Durham, it first appeared in these columns in 1997 and in the ensuing 12 years of the At Your Service column was dusted down another ten times.

The answer is that you can negotiate with a terrorist. Clearly it’s the way the archbishop tells them.

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