The pub remains the great London institution, a place to be among people while leaving them alone

The London pub is, I am increasingly convinced, the only place in this city where the contradictions of London life are fully resolved, where the deep British desire to be among other people coexists peacefully with the equally deep British desire to be left entirely alone. I, Lowri Griffiths, have spent a regrettable and educational amount of time in London pubs, and I have come to regard them as the city’s great unsung achievement, the institution that makes the rest of London life bearable.

The Genius of the Pub

What the pub achieves, and what no other social space quite manages, is a kind of optional sociability, a setting in which you can be as social or as solitary as you wish, with no obligation to be either. You can arrive alone, sit in a corner with a pint and a book, and be perfectly content, surrounded by people but engaging with none of them, and this will be regarded as entirely normal. Or you can fall into conversation with a stranger at the bar and emerge three hours later having discussed everything from football to the meaning of life, and this too is normal. The pub permits both, and judges neither.

This is harder to achieve than it sounds, and most attempts at creating sociable spaces fail at it, producing either the forced jollity of places that demand you participate or the cold isolation of places where connection is impossible. The pub threads this needle through centuries of accumulated custom, creating an environment in which the company of others is available but never compulsory, present but never imposed. It is the architecture of optional human contact, perfected over generations of British people who desperately want company and cannot quite admit it.

The pub’s place in British life is genuinely central, and the institution has weathered enormous pressures, from changing habits to rising costs to the long shadow of the pandemic, with bodies and campaigns dedicated to the preservation of the traditional pub documenting both its struggles and its stubborn endurance. That so many pubs have survived, against such odds, testifies to how deeply they answer to something in the British character, some need that no other institution quite meets.

The Pub as Neutral Ground

Part of the pub’s genius is that it is neutral ground, a place that belongs to no one and therefore to everyone, where the usual hierarchies and divisions of London life are suspended. In the pub, the banker and the builder stand at the same bar, wait the same wait, and drink the same beer, and for the duration of the visit they are simply two people in a pub, equals in a way they would not be anywhere else in this stratified city. The pub is a great leveller, one of the few spaces where London’s divisions briefly dissolve.

This neutrality makes the pub the natural setting for the encounters that London otherwise makes difficult, the place where you can meet people outside your usual circles, where conversations happen that would happen nowhere else. The London of work and home and commute is a London of silos, each of us moving through our own narrow channel, rarely crossing paths with those outside it. The pub is where the channels meet, where the silos break down, where the city’s separate worlds briefly overlap.

I have had conversations in London pubs that I could have had nowhere else, with people I would never otherwise have met, on subjects I would never otherwise have discussed. The pub creates the conditions for these encounters and then gets out of the way, providing the setting, the lubrication, and the permission, and trusting the rest to happen on its own. It is a remarkably sophisticated piece of social technology, disguised as a place that sells beer.

The Threat and the Endurance

The London pub is under threat, as it has always been under threat, from rising rents and changing habits and the relentless pressure of a city that converts everything valuable into something more profitable. Pubs close, are converted into flats, vanish from neighborhoods that have known them for generations, and each loss diminishes the city, removes another of the neutral grounds where London’s separate worlds could meet. The pressure is real, and the losses are mounting, and the future of the institution is genuinely uncertain.

And yet the pub endures, stubbornly, against the odds, because the need it answers does not go away. As long as Londoners desire company without obligation, as long as they want to be among people while remaining free to be alone, as long as they need neutral ground where the city’s divisions dissolve, the pub will have a purpose, and as long as it has a purpose, some pubs, at least, will survive. The institution adapts, struggles, and persists, because the alternative, a London without pubs, is a London that has lost something essential to itself.

I will do my part, which consists primarily of continuing to patronize my local with a dedication that my bank account does not endorse, and of writing about the pub and its place in London life over at my home on The London Prat, because the pub deserves a chronicler, and I am, for better or worse, willing to do the research.

So raise a glass to the London pub, the great institution that lets us be social and antisocial at once, that gives us company without obligation and neutral ground in a divided city. More reflections on London’s institutions appear at The London Prat, and the campaigns to save Britain’s pubs will tell you how the struggle to preserve them is going, which is to say, with difficulty, but not without hope.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/