Last Orders for the Soul: The Bohemian Boozer and the British Psyche
The pub is, at its core, a business. Let’s not dress it up in nostalgia before we’ve even started. Someone owns it, someone profits from it, and the beer you’re drinking has been priced to ensure that happens.
The romantic notion of the pub as a great democratic institution, a living room for the nation, a place where the plumber sits next to the professor and they sort out the world together, all of that is real, and all of that exists in service of a profit margin.
With a handful of exceptions, the community-owned local saved from developers by a whip-round and a lot of determined people who really like their Thursday night pub quiz, the pub is commerce dressed in soft lighting. There’s nothing wrong with that. Commerce can be beautiful. Commerce can, occasionally, be art.
A mirror to our culture
Mostly it isn’t.
Most pubs you walk into today are owned by someone you’ve never met and will never meet. They belong to Wetherspoons, whose founder has the political instincts of a gammon-coloured haunted Victorian railway station.
Or they’re tied to Punch Taverns, or one of the big breweries whose marketing departments have decided that what the British public really wants is the same inoffensive beige experience, replicated across five hundred locations, with the same font on the chalkboard and the same four craft beers and a menu that offers “dirty fries” as its most radical statement.
These pubs are a mirror to our culture, in the same way that a ring road retail park is a mirror to our culture. Accurate. Depressing. Technically functional. They reflect the great flattening of British life, the homogenisation of taste, the management of risk, the corporate decision that nobody should ever feel sufficiently challenged by a pub that they might leave without buying a second drink.
The Moon Underwater
Any serious pub person has their exceptions. Their free houses. Their places that have somehow resisted the gravitational pull of sameness. Mine is the Cock Tavern in Hackney, or The Post Bar in Tottenham, which has the energy of late 1970s punk band; individual, expressive, occasionally crude, never caring what good taste thinks of it.
The bohemian pub has always existed in the cultural imagination as something slightly apart from reality. George Orwell invented the Moon Under Water, his perfect London pub, a place of engraved glass and liver-and-bacon and mothers who brought their children, which he then revealed at the end of the essay didn’t actually exist.
Civilisation is ending and everyone has decided to drink through it
The pubs in Withnail and I are temples of beautiful dysfunction, places where a man can order two pints and two quadruple whiskeys at afternoon last orders or “the finest wines available to humanity” (yes, I know that scene is in a cafe not a pub) and where the general atmosphere suggests that civilisation is ending and everyone has decided to drink through it.
The bar in The Rum Diaries is where journalism goes to die and is somehow more alive for it. In Spaced the pub is both a refuge, at the end of several episodes, and a place of adventure, in the infamous Camden night out episode.
Making culture
These fictional pubs point at something real. There have always been places, The Turf Tavern in Oxford, the Yorkshire House in Lancaster, the Haçienda in Manchester, CBGB’s in New York, if you’ll allow a stretch of the definition, where the point wasn’t really the drinking, or even the music.
These were the excuses. The point was the gathering. The community. The Eagle and Child in Oxford, where Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and the rest of the Inklings sat and argued about God and dragons and the nature of heroism over pints of mild. These places didn’t just reflect culture. They made it.
Everything ends up looking the same
There are fewer of them now. This is not paranoia or nostalgia, it’s arithmetic. Business rates, energy costs, the beer tie that allows pub companies to charge their tenants above-market prices for the privilege of selling you a pint at a loss, the general economic atmosphere of a country that has been doing the equivalent of eating its own furniture for sustenance, all of it conspires against the small, the weird, the non-replicable.
Then there’s Instagram. I say this as someone who posts on Instagram, which gives me the moral authority of a man complaining about traffic from the inside of his car.
The documentation of experience, the relentless photographing of interiors, the turning of character into content, has a flattening effect of its own. The pub becomes an aesthetic. The aesthetic attracts people who want the aesthetic without the substance. The substance quietly suffocates. Everything ends up looking the same.
Thriving despite everything
Yet. They survive. Some of them thrive.
Post Bar in Tottenham sits in this tradition as if it arrived there by accident and decided to stay. It’s a meeting point for artists and activists, a place where the evening’s entertainment might be a gig, a political meeting, an immersive theatre performance, or something that doesn’t have a name yet.
It is, in the oldest sense, a public house, a place that belongs to the people who use it, that takes its shape from them rather than from a brand guidelines document.
What Wetherspoons will never grasp
This is what the bohemian pub has always understood that Wetherspoons will never grasp: a pub can be a hideaway from reality. A place where you can, for the duration of a few pints, believe in a different version of the world.
Where radical ideas get their first airing before they become common sense. Where art gets made, or at least seriously discussed, or at least loudly argued about. Where you can be someone slightly different from who you are outside the door.
The way people love art
Late capitalism is very good at absorbing things and selling them back to you. It has done this with punk, with craft beer, with the very idea of authenticity. There’s something about the genuinely bohemian pub that resists packaging. It resists because it isn’t really a product. It’s a work of art.
People love it the way they love art, fiercely, personally, in a way that makes them show up, and spend money, and tell their friends, and fight to keep it open when someone tries to turn it into flats.
That’s not a business model. It’s something better. It’s a reason to exist.
"80 - Natural Copper Bar Top, Wetherspoons, Brigg" by Metal Sheets Limited is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
