Inside the Aigburth Arms: The Liverpool Pub Where Red Dwarf Was Born
Fans of a television show will often travel a very long way to stand in the spot where it was made, with Red Dwarf having as devoted a following as any. That sees people flying in from across Europe and the United States for its conventions and anniversaries.
What a good number of them never quite clock is that the real starting point is not a film studio at all. It is an ordinary pub in a quiet corner of south Liverpool.
The Aigburth Arms sits on Victoria Road, a couple of miles out from the city centre, and it is where Rob Grant and Doug Naylor first dreamt the whole thing up over a pint or two. So what is actually there for a fan who makes the pilgrimage?
Where to Find It
Aigburth is a residential suburb in the south of the city of Liverpool, the sort of place people live rather than visit, located a fair way from The Beatles trail and the Albert Dock. The pub is at 6 Victoria Road, L17 0DL, on a corner amongst the terraces and from the outside it is a solid Victorian local rather than anything that announces its place in television history.
In here they call me Jodie ‘Cinzano Bianco’ Sampson.
#WhiteHole
Just realised that hashtag is double entendre heavy, but fuck it.
— Jodie May Sampson🏳️⚧️🌈 (@justjodiemay.bsky.social) 14:37 · Oct 23, 2024
Getting there is straightforward enough. It sits a short walk from Aigburth station, and the likes of the buses along Aigburth Road run close by, so a visitor staying in town does not need a car to reach it if they don’t have one.
The Plaque & the Pool Table
The thing most fans come for is the plaque. It records that the pub is the ‘birthplace of Red Dwarf’ and that the ‘show creators Grant Naylor drank here as students’. It went up in the April of 2009, when the cast came to unveil it themselves.
The other thing to look out for is the pool table. In the TV show, Lister is left under a pool table here as a baby, and grows into a legend on the pub’s ‘gravity pool table’, known to the regulars as ‘Cinzano Bianco’ because once he was on it he could not be shifted. The real table will not defy gravity, but it is a fair spot for a game and a nod to the story.
The Pub as It Is Now
These days the Aigburth Arms is run by Blind Tiger Inns and works as a proper neighbourhood boozer rather than a theme pub, with a big garden out the back, sport on the televisions, the odd bit of live music and a warm welcome for well behaved dogs. Whoever fills the place on a given night is far more likely to be a local than a fan with a camera.
It is worth bearing in mind that the pub spent years trading as the Victoria before taking back its original name in 2020, a change some Liverpudlian fans greeted with the joke that the Red Dwarf timeline had at last been ‘restored’. Given the fact that a back-street local keeps its own time, anyone travelling a distance to see it should check the current opening hours and any event nights on the pub’s own Facebook page first.
