That said, the range of real ales here would do credit to even the most spit-and-sawdust establishment.

By local accounts, the Dolphin was once a spit-and-sawdust kind of place, and not in a knowing Shoreditch way.

You enter through a roomy drinking area, an interior designer's spiffy dream of a spit-and-sawdust public bar.

If you turn right once you walk through the door you’ll soon see that it is, in every sense, still a proper spit-and-sawdust Victorian village pub.

I went along to a training session with the BanDogs at a spit-and-sawdust gym in south London to find out.

It was, literally, a spit-and-sawdust place, where students from Edinburgh College of Art queued to get the bars cut for their canvases.

On the eve of Euro 2008, I sought an assessment of Spain's chances from a waiter in a spit-and-sawdust restaurant.

Drive along the seafront and the city lulls you into a false sense of insecurity: burnt-down pier, Iceland supermarket, amusement arcades and spit-and-sawdust pubs.

And it gained a reputation as a kind of spit-and-sawdust venue, whose customers preferred pints of bitter to the more "sophisticated" drinks imbibed in other Westminster bars.

“His idea of a good time was to go to a spit-and-sawdust saloon, whereas my mother was aspirational and wanted to go somewhere elegant, and often took me instead.

They met in a pub close to her flat, a spit-and-sawdust joint where they could be sure Simon would never enter because it was unlikely to contain anyone worth impressing.

It was a hotel once, patronized by seamen glad to be on land, as we were, a spit-and-sawdust place with a pool table and Nazareth playing on the jukebox.

"There is now a general recognition that if you are just a spit-and-sawdust boozer, and your customers are not allowed to smoke, then they will leave and not come back.

This has worked perfectly for Shirley Bassey, but in the spit-and-sawdust ambience of a modern venue, it doesn't encourage the audience to move, and a strangely static quality fell over the evening.

Within living memory the city was a grimy leftover of an industrial era that had moved on, leaving its detritus of factories and smokestacks, cramped Victorian housing and spit-and-sawdust pubs.

The Bronx-born brothers began making outrageous pastiches of Hollywood aesthetics and American morals in their family home as teenagers in the late 50s and went on to create hundreds of hilarious spit-and-sawdust mini-epics.

Like everything here, the Newmarket Racecourse is just a short walk from the High Street (20 minutes), but with its sleek, airport terminal-sized grandstand, it's miles away from the old spit-and-sawdust racetracks of the past.

Which was just as well, because in this company, this spit-and-sawdust setting, I knew I was a sharp contrast, my white designer anorak and grey houndstooth casuals an intrusion as stark as the electronic fruit machine flickering unheeded at the back of the bar.

He's in the middle of teaching hunters a lesson in one spit-and-sawdust arena when he's scooped up by a perky, red-haired mutant called Yukio (Rila Fukushima), who wants to escort him to Japan so he can say goodbye to dying billionaire Yashida (Hal Yamanouchi).

Many of the interiors created by the designers of such facilities are as forbidding as the old-fashioned spit-and-sawdust pub; any lingering atmosphere is swept away in a barrage of stained wood and fake Victoriana, and any casual visitors made to feel inordinately guilty if they do not, alas, wish to eat.