Back to the Local

As a little gem of a book published in 1949 shows, your local boozer has been under threat for a long time.

There’s an initiative happening this Saturday 10 February called Support an Independent Pub Day which has been launched by Alistair von Lion, aka the London Pub Explorer, one half of the duo behind the excellent East End Pubs book I wrote about last year, and CityStack. The latter is a company founded by Alison Boutoille, a lady from France of all places, to promote independent London pubs. With a name like Support an Independent Pub Day, it doesn’t need much explanation. 

It’s no secret that the hospitality trade is having a hell of time with soaring energy bills and changing habits. Where I live in Faversham, two much-loved pubs which had recently reopened with great fanfare, The George at Newnham and The Anchor by the creek, have both announced that they will be closing in the last month. In both cases the landlords citing the struggle of trying to make money in today’s climate. 

The initiative is designed to get people to visit those small, unusual pubs that don't have the backing of of big pub chains (though the latter pubs are also struggling.) I’ve been reading a book published in 1949 which suggests that such pubs have been under threat for a long time now. It’s called Back to the Local by Maurice Gorham and has a similar message to the 10 February campaign - to get people back into the habit of visiting their local boozer. While we had the disruptions of Covid-19 lockdowns, Gorham’s generation had the Second World War and rationing to contend with. What are we complaining about?

Gorham was a journalist who was born in Ireland in 1902 but educated and spent most of his working life in England in journalism and a stint at the BBC. The book is a sequel to The Local; both are evocatively illustrated by  Edward Ardizzone (who had one of those fascinating 20th century lives, born in French Indochina to a pied noir father and an English mother, which would make a great Any Human Heart-style novel).

In many ways, the world of Back to the Local will be instantly familiar to pub goers these days. Gorham writes: “If you find a really modest pub, old-fashioned, unaffected, small where you are given a welcome and can quickly get served, you may be almost sure that it is slated for demolition….” When he was writing, there was collusion between magistrates who issued licences for pubs and brewers that number of pubs in a certain neighbourhood should be reduced: “Brewer, Bench, publican and sometimes staff. All of these people, for their different reasons, would rather have one modern pub than three old-fashioned ones.” Nowadays pubs are similarly restricted but this time by complaints from neighbours.

Then just as now, pubs were having their insides stripped out in the name of modernisation: “Replacing the noisome tavern… by modern cafe-pub, light, airy, spacious, where in the reformer’s dream, the Man could bring his wife and family… and drink soft drinks…” I think with a shudder about when the Anchor in Faversham was renovated last year. Centuries of patina was destroyed, the walls white washed and cushions with the word ‘love’ on it scattered around a pub that used to have the atmosphere of a smuggler’s lair. The locals deserted it and it closed within six months (it has since been renovated again under new management, with much of its charm restored but it will once again be closing next month). Pubs can be cleaned up but they should never be renovated. Gorham writes: 

“Leave it alone, and that no amount of design, no amusing textiles and ingenious furnishings, can get as good result as you find in many a rather dark bar that gleams softly with the reflections from well-scrubbed pewter and well-polished glass”. 

Gorham even had to contend with the 1940s version of hipsters ruining his local haunts. Incursions of “bright young things” with “curly moustaches, the scarlet fingernails, the Old School ties, and the New Look blondes…” It sounds a lot like Bethnal Green in the 00s. He calls it the “flash trade menace”: “It was a terrible thing to see this happening to a pub. If it persisted the old regulars abandoned the pub…” 

Though the word hadn’t been coined, gentrification was coming or as Gorham puts it: “Piercing voices from the West End”. At the time most pubs were still divided into a public bar for workmen and a saloon bar for professionals and women with different prices and indeed drinks in each. But change was afoot: “Pull down the partitions, and instead of a complicated series of bars you would just have a medium-sized room”. There are very few of these places left. Sam Smith’s pubs like the John Snow in Soho still preserve this look but not the social division. You can still feel the divide in places like the Blythe Hill Tavern in Catford where the front bar is mainly for old locals while the ‘flash trade’, youngish professionals, tend to drink out that back. 

Which is just how it should be, Gorham is appalled at the thought of saloon bar customers slumming it in public bar to play darts: “For a time the long-established social stratification of the pubs was knocked sideways, and the chief victims were the regulars of the cheap side. However much they might resent the invasion they should not retaliate; they were not going to pay more in the Saloon.” We might fondly think of traditional pubs as place where all social classes mixed but it seems that most of the time, they didn’t, and when they did, it was reluctantly. 

In other ways too the book is a window into another world. The beer drunk was largely bitter and mild, no lager and certainly no cloudy IPAs unless something had gone very wrong. 

Beer was still being rationed, sometimes pubs wouldn’t have any. Supermarkets didn’t exist and off licenses were few and far between so for most people looking to buy beer, the pub was the only option. According to Gorham wine was best avoided at most pubs (actually perhaps things haven’t changed so much) and the chapter on food in pubs is the shortest in the book. Apparently there was very little actual drunkenness which I find hard to believe: “I cannot remember meeting a drunk in a pub since the war,” he claims.

Sadly many of the pubs Gorham writes about have gone the way of the great London brewers like Truman, Hanbury & Buxton which must have seemed so mighty in the 1940s but some have survived, like the pubs on Kinnerton Street in Knightsbridge. We should treasure them and most importantly visit them. A good pub has to be a living institution not a museum or a tourist destination. 

So how can we save the London pub? Well, I’m not sure a  £116,000 a year ‘night czar’ will do anything. Initiatives to get people nto the boozer might help as long as people keep going back. But you can’t make people go to the pub, there’s so many other things to do these days. Homes are much more comfortable with television, video games and the internet. In Gorham’s time, the pub was about the only warm place to get a drink. And according to the Spectator, young people aren’t drinking! O tempora, o mores!

Award-winning beer writer Will Hawkes, whose London Beer City newsletter is well worth subscribing to, has a different perspective: “Amid this gloom something interesting has happened: I think London’s best pubs are as good as I’ve ever seen them”. He thinks that Covid-19 lockdowns made people appreciate a good pub but more than this the surviving pubs have had to up their game:

“London’s best pubs are now cleaner, friendlier, and with beer in better condition than at any point during the 20 years I’ve lived in London. You can debate the causes - Covid-19, better general understanding about how beer should taste/look (Shit London Guinness has definitely helped), the quality of modern landlords/managers, the pressure pubs are currently under (‘Pressure makes diamonds’, as one London brewery owner once put it to me) - but something has shifted.” 

Lewisham, land of dead pubs, is a great example of how things have improved. There are marvellous old-school pubs, like the Blythe Hill Tavern and the Dacre Arms. There are beautiful new pubs, such as The Shirker’s and Joyce. There are good pubs for students, good pubs for food, good pubs for families, and pubs where everyone rubs along very nicely. 

It’s easy to be negative, and yes, there are loads of reasons why now is particularly hard. But sometimes there’s good news too.” 

I’d like to believe its true. But it’s still a good idea to heed Gorham’s advice, get back to your local now, just in case. 

There’s a new edition of Back to the Local published by Faber & Faber in June. Meanwhile the print on demand edition is available now.