The Maple Leaf Pub

Hey all,
Just wanted to let everyone new to England know that if your over for July 1st, if you are feeling home sick there is a great party at the Maple Leaf pub in London. I believe it's in Covent Gardens, I am sure I spelt that wrong anyway, it serves great canadian food like poutine and the best yet that it sells Molson canadian and that is worth the trip to London on it's own.
Cheers,
Kristin

Hi Kristin,

THanks for reminding me of the Canada day Party I have been here for over 4 years and haven't been there yet. So this year I am going to go
Do you know of anywhere to stay in London thats reasonable I will be travelling from birmingham?

Susan

anybody else have experiences from the leaf on canada day? was thinking of making the trip over. is it worth it?

Made it to the Maple Leaf last year for July 1st. Good fun really. Standing room only.... out into the street. They close the small street around the pub to traffic and it become a streetparty fuelled by Tragically Hip music, Hockey on the screen and six packs of Moosehead, Molson Canadian, and Sleemans sold at the bar. Just down the street from the maple leaf is the Canada Store, where you can pickup the little items that you grow to miss from back in the great white north.

Cheers and maybe see you there in July,

Darin

Did anyone make it to the Maple Leaf Pub for Canada Day?

There was a picture of the party in the Toronto Star this week and even though I haven't left Canada yet, I felt comforted there was a fun place for me to go on holidays so I won't be too homesick.

Maybe I'll see ya at Thanksgiving!

I was there, and to be honest I felt it was a great disappointment.

Basically you have an entire city block (which spills out and really becomes two or three blocks) at the Maple Leaf Pub cordoned off from traffic. You get tons of people crammed into a very small space, much like riding the Underground at rush hour.

It's a laugh because you're getting tanked with friends, and it's a novelty to be in a crowd of fellow Canucks while in the UK, but because it's "elbow to elbow", there's no real free exchange or intermingling of strangers.

It took me a good 20 minutes just to elbow my way through the crowd to get to the front entrance of the pub, from which they were selling Molson, Labatts and Sleemans. After a while most people on the fringes on the crowd just went to nearby markets to get UK beer, as it wasn't worth the hassle of trying to get through the crowd to buy Canuck beer from the pub entrance.

They have lots of coppers there (the usual for any crowd of decent size in the UK, as English turn into morons when they're pissed up), and they put metal fencing around the sidewalks so help all the corporate whores walk seemlessly past the event. It would be much better to use the sidewalks as lines to get alcohol, and have outsider pedestrians simply use another street.

All in all it was an experience, but I wouldn't bother going back again in the future. It would be MUCH better if this event was held in an open space, such as Hyde Park.