Devil of a problem

You'd have a job getting a pint in this place - there's more metal than at an Iron Maiden gig... and it hasn't served a drink for over two years.

It's always sad to see a pub closed down, possibly for good. And Bristol has more than its fair share. I blipped about one of them, The Phoenix, last year. It's only a few hundred yards away from this hostelry.

The Printer's Devil is just across the road from the newspaper office where I work - hence the name, which is what they used to call a printing apprentice (possibly because he or she would have worked with ink all the time and ended up with it all over their face).

It is shored up because a huge building alongside it was demolished recently and the Printer's Devil itself is grade two listed, and therefore has to remain intact.

However, one interesting thing I have discovered is that the pub, which dates back at least a couple of centuries, has actually undergone change relatively recently.

The name, for example, is a recent one. It used to be called the Queen's Head, but I read somewhere that it earned its new name in a newspaper competition 20 or 30 years ago.

And you might be forgiven for thinking the front of the pub has always looked this way (the design of the pub itself, not the scaffolding!), but actually the bay window used to be on on the right and the door on the left. It was changed in the 1980s.

Once upon a time, journalists from the Evening Post used to frequent the place. It would be big (and welcome) news if they ever got the chance again.

Read more about it and see a fascinating archive photograph here.