8:45am Wednesday 23rd January 2008
By Chloe Lambert
These friendly folk don't look the type to be barred from their local pub.
But the Queen Adelaide cricketing club and their wives have been officially ejected from the pub they play for - they say because of their age.
Chris Locke, 50, and his friends have been drinking at the Putney Bridge Road pub every Friday night for 15 years, even after it was revamped in 2005 and began attracting a younger, trendier crowd.
But as the club were finishing their drinks on the Friday before Christmas, the manager approached Mr Locke.
"He called me over and said, we'd rather you didn't come here anymore'," said Mr Locke. "He said you're clearly not happy here'."
The manager said the cricketing club and their friends had been rude to his staff. He permanently barred all 25 of them, including former Wandsworth councillor Pauline Brueseke, from the Queen Adelaide.
The middle-aged group have now been taken in by The Bricklayers Arms in Waterman Street and have renamed their cricketing club after it.
Young's have vehemently denied allegations of ageism.
Mr Locke, of Norroy Road, said: "It's a shame to put it mildly. We weren't causing any harm. This pub has been part of our lives. OK, it's changed, but it's our local and it should be our decision whether we stop coming."
A spokesman for Young's, which owns the Queen Adelaide, said the manager's decision was not linked to age.
He said: "We understand the decision by the landlord was the culmination of a long period of antisocial behaviour by this group of people over the past 14 months, that had led to a number of our bar staff refusing to serve them. The landlord of the Queen Adelaide has our total support for his decision."
Mr Locke said: "Those allegations are ludicrous and quite nasty. It was the first conversation we'd ever had with the manager, which he admitted to me.
"If we were causing problems why was this never raised before? We are hardly a bunch of hoodies. It's obvious we just don't fit his profile of customers."
He said City workers from the new Riverside development nearby had begun flocking to the pub since it was refurbished, but his group had still enjoyed going there for a quiet drink to start off the weekend.
"There's a definite fad among the breweries for simply targeting the wealthy young, and it becomes a herd instinct," he said.
"Eventually they are all going to fail on that basis because they are ignoring a lot of people who will be there a lot longer."
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