A Margherita in Tolkien’s Middle-earth: Pizza in the Courtyard at Sarehole Mill reviewed

Sarehole Mill is four miles south of the centre of Birmingham. If this were a fairy tale, and it should be, it would follow that Birmingham swallowed Sarehole a century ago, like a dragon and its prey. I like Birmingham: I like its optimism, its violence and its multiplex, which can match any American Midwest mall in competitive dystopia and idiocy. Birmingham has energy, and that swallowed Sarehole, but unfortunately for Birmingham, there was a writer who cared: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.Sarehole was his childhood palace, and now, more reluctantly I would imagine, his memorial pizzeria. 

A whimsical restaurant review grappling Tolkien would normally visit the Eastgate Hotel on Merton Street, Oxford, a gloomy inn next to the college where he taught philology while writing The Lord of the Rings. There is something insatiably unhappy about the Eastgate, as if the Boer War were ongoing. Even so, Tolkien liked it, and he ate there when he lived next door at no. 21. But this column is more ambitious, and so it travels to Sarehole: to (J.R.R. Tolkien’s) Pizza in the Courtyard. There are no novelty names here, no Smaug Laketown Hot. This is not the Brontë Balti in Haworth. Tolkien was an Englishman.

Sarehole Mill is 18th-century and red-brick, with a tower and a bright green pond. It sits on the foundations of an older building, which milled from 1542, the year that Henry VIII chopped his young wife Catherine Howard’s head off, if you cannot mark the date. It is now a museum.

The entrance is less Middle-earth than Narnia, though I have always found Narnia more flimsy and less believable than Hobbiton: talking lions are stupid. Even so, one moment you are on a tepid suburban bus route, and suddenly you are in the crucible fire of Tolkien’s imagination, which feels unimaginably peaceful.