The Peel

I saw my mate have sex on a pool table and I also saw a man get hit with a mother fucking pick axe handle during a rendition of bohemian rhapsody. It was truly an amazing night.

A truly awful mix of bad pub, bad metal and desperate strippers in the wrong part of town. No, it’s not Lemmy’s autobiography, it’s the aptly named Sir Robert Peel: Believe me, the police are still there every night!!! It’s surely Kingston’s worst pub. A rough, scary crowd drink there & the utterly grim Cambridge Estate is just round the back should you fancy a proper kicking after closing time. I just can’t believe girls are walking around half naked with empty pint pots collecting pound coins after taking their clothes off in 2010. Horrible.

So, I used to go here quite a lot, back in the day. A lot has changed since, and the crowd has almost entirely changed from what I’ve observed. Those longer standing members may see people from years gone by every now and again, but usually just for a gig that specifically interests them. It holds a lot of nostalgia for me, and my sister, which will always tilt the scales of judgement.
It feels odd to say this, but the new crowd doesn’t feel quite so much my scene, even though it is actually largely supported, based upon my last few times there, by people I went to school with.
Anyway. The venue. As mentioned before, there are numerous aspects to it. 3, in fact. You have the strip club at the back, the ‘normal’ bar in the middle, with the TV, pool table (which can be cramped to play) and a machine or two, and the music venue/​stage area/​bar to the side. Seating is pretty much always available outside, with limited parking on the premises too.
This place used to be pretty much exclusively metal, and still holds on to a fair portion of that trend, but it’s also kept up and moved on — with the new crowd, I suppose. It now mostly broadcasts itself as a ‘progrock’ venue. I’m not quite sure what that is, but I’ve seen a couple of bands there now on a whim, who I’ve since fallen a little in love with, so hey.
It’s not a bar I go specifically to when I simply fancy a drink. It’s somewhere I will go to meet some old friends from those days, however, or to see a band. They hold a lot of events, usually 3 – 4 a week, which is constantly mailed out via the facebook group and maybe the main website, too. If you’re local and after a new scene for cheap gigs, good drinks and a usually quite open crowd, this is worth the try. So close to The Fighting Cocks however, with a fairly similar scene, can cause some conflicts of interest on nights out — so be warned.
To reinforce what Cari has said, the area is dodgy. I personally have known people to be beat fairly badly around here, sometimes have knives pulled on them, and I personally have been lifted up by the throat before too. However, the area has got a lot better recently, after the council made a serious effort to clean things up a bit. A lot less intimidating to walk to alone — although, most people leave together anyway (read: closing time), and almost all the routes home are down the same road, so if safety in numbers is a requirement, it’s not too difficult to find.
All in all, it’s a nice place in itself, and worth the visit.

Ooh, this place is dirty. Great fun as well. Have you ever been down the pub and thought to yourself, what can I do here apart from drink? Well, if you are at The Peel, you are in luck because you can walk through into a room which has plenty of strippers to keep you occupied. There is also a part of the pub which is a live music venue, but I doubt that caught your attention as much.
Let’s be honest, The Peel is in a properly dodgy bit of Kingston, and the estates opposite don’t exactly look like the kind of places that you want to be hanging around on a dark night, but for some reason, The Peel manages to stay trouble-​free, and has a really good crowd. There are often live music on. I recall a friends birthday which coincided with a heavy metal band playing, but the music can be more mixed then just thrash metal. I saw a great ska band from California here once. I think we may have been the biggest crowd that they ever played to.
The drinks are typical pub drinks, and they do plenty of shots which seem like a good idea at the time, but never are. So back to the strippers — you pay them to dance by the pound, not by the note — they walk around with jugs to drop coins into before they start dancing. Which doesn’t exactly make it a classy affair, but then, you are in a rock pub that backs onto an estate — who the hell said anything about class?!