I’ve been drinking up and down the lengths of the Bold/Wood/Slater Streets complex for years and was solidly confident that I’d been in every single grotty boozehole and lurid, hellish club in the area. Then just the other day I spotted the Old Rope Walk and realised its threshold has never been blessed with my presence. How did it slip under the radar? It’s mere feet away from my usual haunts, gosh darn it. Bathed perpetually in the banshee shriek of karaōke, being in here can feel like some kind of tolerance test. The main room of the pub is slopped in a paint job that gives a weird sense of the place being unfinished. My theory is that the decorators took as much of the singing as they could before fleeing and waiving their fee. Yeah, that’s got to be it.