This refurbished pub in deepest Cambridgeshire will satisfy locals and unpretentious day-trippers alike
Heading to the Red Lion (closest station Ely) on a Saturday lunchtime, the train falls utterly silent once we are rid of the Cambridge day-trippers. It’s a ferociously pretty morning in the Fens. Spring is vying to spring, but no one is travelling farther east with me towards Wicken, Soham or Fordham. On arrival at the Red Lion, I’m the only customer. By the end of lunch, there are five.
If, for you, Brexit’s impetus was to “take our country back”, then here are some green shoots of abandonment to go with your smashing blue passport. In recent years, this area has been home to thousands of Lithuanians and Portuguese, who have impudently turned up to pick fruit, care for our elderly or, in Soham, open Portuguese coffee and tapas joints such as Dominika’s and A Tasca. Recent headlines, however, say the days of free-flowing foreigners to the region are over. They’re giving us a swerve, apparently, and the cheeky bastards are instead flitting off to warmer places with stronger currencies and where the locals didn’t expres s a preference that they do one.
This is not a place for dry ice, sous-vides or serving staff droning through the curriculum vitae of the mutton
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