Lowri Griffiths Documents the Final Stage of a Transformation That Started With the Artisan Bread
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Lowri Griffiths | North London | prat.uk/author/lowri-griffiths/
The Pub I Used to Know
The transformation of my local pub — the one I have been going to for eleven years, the one where the carpet pattern dates from an era when carpet patterns were the primary form of interior design intervention and no one saw any reason to change it — is now complete. I noticed this week that the chalkboard behind the bar, which used to list the beers available in a handwriting style consistent with mild urgency and declining visibility, now lists “Craft Gin Selection” in the kind of font that someone made a decision about. The gin list has twelve items. Three of them describe themselves as “small batch.” Two reference the botanicals. One says “Islington.” The Islington gin costs fourteen pounds for a measure that my father would describe as a modest dram.
The process by which this happened began, as it always does, with the artisan bread. First comes the artisan bread — sourdough, naturally, from a bakery that opened where the laundrette used to be — and everything else follows with the inevitability of gentrification’s internal logic. The artisan bread brings the artisan cheese. The artisan cheese brings the deli. The deli brings the wine shop. The wine shop brings the people who want the wine shop. The people who want the wine shop go to the pub and ask why there isn’t a craft gin selection. The craft gin selection appears. The carpet is replaced. The handwriting on the chalkboard is replaced by font. The pub is now a “gastropub,” which is a word that should not exist but does, and which I use now without registering how strange it is, because that is how gentrification works: the strange becomes normal before you notice it has.
What I Actually Miss
The carpet, obviously. Not for aesthetic reasons — I am aware that it was not aesthetically defensible — but for the specific quality of un-selfconsciousness that it represented. A pub with that carpet did not care what you thought of it. It was there for the beer and the quiet and the occasional quiz night. It was not trying to be a destination. It was a place. The distinction between a place and a destination is the distinction between somewhere that exists because people need it and somewhere that exists because it has been made legible to people who are moving through. The pub was a place. The gastropub is a destination. I visit the destination. I miss the place.
London’s pubs are in decline as a category even as individual examples are transformed into more lucrative configurations. The Time Out London pub coverage tracks openings and closings with the attention of an outlet that genuinely cares about pub culture and has watched a lot of it change in ways that are individually presentable and collectively concerning. The pubs that close become flats. The pubs that survive become gastropubs. The ones in the middle — unremarkable, unrenovated, serving beer at prices that allow people with ordinary incomes to have a social life — are the ones disappearing most quickly, because their business model doesn’t work in a London property market where the landlord’s calculation increasingly favours conversion over tenancy.
The Gin, Though
I want to be honest: the Islington gin is actually quite good. The botanical combination is interesting. The serve, with a specific tonic and a slice of something that isn’t lemon, is considered. I am annoyed that I like it. I am annoyed that “annoyed that I like it” is itself a cliche of the gentrification narrative, which always involves someone who objects to the transformation eventually enjoying one of its products and feeling complicated about it. I am in the cliche. The gin is good. The carpet is gone. The place is now a destination. Happy Mother’s Day, London. Your pubs are changing. Some of the changes are good. The carpet is still gone. This is loss.
More at https://newsthump.com
Living in London means navigating the city’s contradictions daily: the extraordinary alongside the exasperating, the world-class alongside the occasionally third-rate, the genuinely welcoming alongside the socially impenetrable. The contradictions are not bugs. They are the city’s character. A London without contradictions would be a different city — probably a more comfortable one, certainly a less interesting one. The discomfort is where the texture lives. The texture is what we stay for. Or at least what I stay for, eleven years into a North London residence that I have never quite decided is permanent and have never quite seriously considered ending. The city has you or it doesn’t. When it has you, the contradictions become the reasons. When it doesn’t, no amount of good weather or craft gin selections will change that. It has me. Happy Mother’s Day, London. You are exhausting and irreplaceable.
Living in London means navigating the city’s contradictions daily: the extraordinary alongside the exasperating, the world-class alongside the occasionally third-rate, the genuinely welcoming alongside the socially impenetrable. The contradictions are not bugs. They are the city’s character. A London without contradictions would be a different city — probably a more comfortable one, certainly a less interesting one. The discomfort is where the texture lives. The texture is what we stay for. Or at least what I stay for, eleven years into a North London residence that I have never quite decided is permanent and have never quite seriously considered ending. The city has you or it doesn’t. When it has you, the contradictions become the reasons. When it doesn’t, no amount of good weather or craft gin selections will change that. It has me. Happy Mother’s Day, London. You are exhausting and irreplaceable.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
