The Old Beer House

Another of the lost delights of my neighbourhood - the Chairman and I always used to refer to this place as the Old Beer House, but in fact it was named, with a certain charming ineptitude (or perhaps I should say a charming literalism), the Beijing Old House Beer Bar. It opened up in my first year here, but survived barely a year: it was on The Street, the magical, crazy, wonderful hutong where I spent most of my early days in Beijing, but which was chai'd at the beginning of my second summer.

As you can see from the picture above, the place was absolutely tiny - barely wider than the front door, and only about 20ft or so deep, with two very small seating areas around the cramped bar. It wasn't really a proper bar, but neither was it horrendously naff in the way that most Chinese "coffee shop" bars in this neighbourhood are. It was dark and cosy inside, tastefully fitted out, and with several rather stylish pieces of traditional Chinese furniture. It was reasonably cheap (although, at this stage of my life here, I still winced at the idea of paying 15 kuai for a Tsingtao, and would only do so fairly infrequently), and the elderly couple who ran it (parents of the owner) were utterly charming.

However, we didn't sit downstairs very often. The place's major attraction was that it boasted the smallest roof terrace in the world - reached by means a very steep and narrow wooden ladder, through a small trapdoor that denied access to anyone of too stout a frame (and regularly resulted in painful head-bumps for lanky old me!). On the slender stretch of roofspace above the entrance there was one picnic table with built-in bench seating, one café umbrella, and (a great touch, this!) a scrap of artificial grass underfoot (the lurid green plastic stuff that greengrocers often use to display their wares). It could only really accommodate 5 or 6 people at the most, only 2 or 3 if you wanted to enjoy the view of the street at the front. The great thing was, you see, that this mini-terrace was only 8ft or 10ft above the level of the street, and so it provided a very intimate - though oddly secluded, inconspicuous, unseen - vantage point for enjoying the colourful bustle of hutong life below.

When my good friend Lizzie visited in the Spring of '04 (she's still the only person to have taken me up on my repeated offers of free accommodation and guided tours!), we would go there together for a sundowner almost every day - those are still some of my happiest memories of Beijing.

And this, by the by, has always been one of my favourite Beijing photographs, a happy accident produced by two guys whizzing past on a bicycle just as I was trying to take the shot above.