The Green Goddess in Blackheath was named SIBA’s City Pub of the Year, just four years after it opened. Its landlords, Maryann and Stephen O’Conner, have focussed on building a community of beer lovers and locals, and a new South London tradition has been key to achieving this. Will North joined them on the bus.

On a Saturday this July, an old London Routermaster pub made its way between four South London bars. The bus tour, known as Shirk, Rust and Pray, takes customers between two branches of the Rusty Bucket, in Bexley and Eltham; the Shirker’s Rest, in New Cross; and the Green Goddess in Blackheath. The bus is driven for much of the journey by Stephen O’Connor of the Green Goddess. And the event drives trade to all of the pubs.

“It’s a spectacle,” says Maryann O’Connor, the Green Goddess’s beer sommelier. “The pub over the road were worried when they saw these people getting off the bus repeatedly. They thought that people were going to come in and mob them. They were just looking astounded as everyone marched across the crossing to us.”

“They were holding up the traffic as they crossed. It was quite amusing to watch traffic sit there for five minutes as our bus disgorged its load and they all marched over the road to the pub.”

The tour normally takes place on an open-topped bus. Happy drinkers wave to passers by, turning it into an advert for the community the O’Connors have built. This year, only a traditional Routemaster was available. But the buzz remained.

“It’s such an enjoyable day. Everybody’s in a good mood, everybody’s enjoying it,” says Stephen. “There was a sing-along and whooping to the driving. It made it such a special day.”

Stephen says the bus, with a capacity of eighty people, was full every trip. That amounted to more than 1,200 passenger journeys.

“Each year we’ve done it, each of the pubs has had their best day of the year,” says Maryann. “This year we had our best day ever.”

The O’Connors met while working for Transport for London, of TfL. They started a family together, and Stephen got his bus drivers’ licence. When he took redundancy from the transport agency, they resolved to follow their dream and enter the beer business.

They started with pop ups, before moving into deliveries when COVID struck. It was on one of these trips that Stephen spotted that the old Barclays pub in Blackheath, near Greenwich, would soon be available.

“The sign was up,” he says. “They were still operating as a bank at that point, but the sign was up,  it was available or going to be available. And that was the trigger.”

The building’s landlords were keen, he adds, welcoming a use for the building that wouldn’t see it become a betting shop or takeaway. But securing planning approval was a months-long challenge. The couple and their local supporters had to take the time to tackle questions and concerns over what a new pub would mean for the local community.

Even with permission in hand, the creaking machinery of local bureaucracy caused some anxiety and cost. It was only with the support of local MP Michael Pennycook that the couple were able to get a change of use properly registered, a key step to keeping the pub’s finances in order.

Today, the pub serves drinks from twenty taps, and three pumps. That gives Maryann plenty of space both for crowdpleasers and more niche experiences.

“A lot of the time people just want a lager or a very low impact pale ale, which is obviously very disappointing to us,” the beer sommelier jokes. “We like to have lots of wacky beer styles on—I say ‘wacky’,  I mean obviously complex and wonderfully made beers that people have put time and energy into honing their recipes.”

The pub keeps a few taps stocked with a few popular options: Siren’s Lumino, Lost and Grounded’s Helles, and Kernel’s London stout, as well as a cider, Nightbird from Nightingale. But they can also explore those more niche options.

One of these is a barrel aged sour, which the O’Connors sourced from the former brewery at Little Earth. “They’re not brewing anymore,” says Stephem, “And that is a spectacular beer.”

The beer had been kept in its casks, before the O’Connors acquired these and stored them even longer.

“It’s a relatively niche beer style,” says Maryann, “That’s one of the reasons we opened, because we want to bring new beer styles to people.”

Story telling is key to building a community like this. The Shirk, Rust and Pray tour is part of the Green Goddess’s story telling, and gives Maryann a starting point for the pub’s social media.

Today, Maryann primarily uses Instagram and its Threads’ spin off, along with Blue Sky. “That’s where we’re all congregating. A lot of us used Twitter quite a lot before it became X, and now it’s just disintegrated. A lot of the conversations we used to have in the beer community were on Twitter, and then it became more and more of a toxic place.”

The O’Connors know that their staff have a vital role to play in that storytelling. They make sure they are paid the London Living Wage, are able to take time off when they need, and are supported in understanding the beer they serve. As people who are neurodivergent, their experience has taught them to employ training that works for each member of the team.

The next step for the O’Connors will be to return to their original dream: brewing their own beer. Stephen, who used his redundancy from TfL to train as a brewer, as well as to support the business’s finances while they got the pub off the ground, is eager to get started.

“We’ve had the kit for a while,” he says. “What we haven’t had is the money and the time. Sometimes we’ve had the money, and sometimes we’ve had the time. But not together.”

Now, with the pub’s success recognised by SIBA, and the Shirk, Rust and Pray tour a fixture on every South London drinker’s calendar, they’re ready for that next step.