Lowri Griffiths on grief, gentrification, and the slow disappearance of the small civic spaces that hold a neighbourhood together

The pub at the end of my road is closing. It is being converted, the planning notice tells me, into ‘mixed-use residential’ which is, as far as I can work out, four flats above a shop that will sell coffee for five pounds and call itself a ‘concept space.’ Building on my earlier dispatches at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, I am, dear reader, in mourning.

What the Pub Was

The pub at the end of my road was not, in any conventional sense, a good pub. The carpet was a pattern that I think was designed in 1973 to disguise vomit, and had, by the time I started drinking there in 2015, fully achieved its purpose. The lighting was a kind of jaundiced yellow that made everyone look as though they had a mild liver complaint. The selection of beer was three things, of which only one was usually available. The Sunday roast had been, for as long as I had been going there, exactly as good as a Sunday roast cooked by a person who had stopped trying in approximately 1998.

And it was, dear reader, the heart of my life. According to The Guardian, recent research from CAMRA and other industry organisations has documented substantial UK pub closures across recent years, with North London bearing a disproportionate share of the losses. Each closure, the researchers argue, represents a substantial loss of social infrastructure. I would put it more directly: each closure is a small civic death.

The Regulars

The pub had a population of regulars who were, considered as a group, the broadest social cross-section I have ever encountered in this city. There was Reg, who had retired from working on the railways in 1991 and who could, if asked, recite the timetable of the East Coast Main Line as it stood in 1987. There was Maeve, an Irish nurse who had moved to North London in the late seventies and who had, over the course of half a century, watched the neighbourhood change three times. There was a man called Kostas who ran a barbershop two doors down, and who would, on quiet Wednesdays, give his customers a haircut and then bring them down to the pub afterwards as a kind of bundle deal. There was a woman who I am pretty sure was a poet, though I never asked.

I have not, in any of my four years of going there, learned all of their surnames. I knew them, in the way one knows people in pubs, by face and first name and the drink they ordered. This is a kind of knowing that is, I think, undervalued. It is the kind of knowing that holds a neighbourhood together.

What Closed It

The pub did not close because it was failing. The pub closed because the building was worth, as a residential conversion, substantially more than it was worth as a pub. According to The Evening Standard, recent reporting has documented substantial patterns of London pub closures driven by the substantial gap between commercial and residential property valuations. The economics, in other words, made the pub’s continued existence irrational from the perspective of its owner, who was a small property investor based, the planning notice said, in Hertfordshire.

I do not blame the small property investor in Hertfordshire. The small property investor in Hertfordshire is, by all accounts, a normal middle-aged person who acquired a North London pub as part of their pension planning, and is now realising the asset in the way the financial structure incentivises them to. The small property investor in Hertfordshire is, in this sense, not the villain. The system is the villain. This is, I admit, a frustrating answer, because the system is not a person you can be cross with.

What Will Replace It

The concept space, when it opens, will sell coffee. It will also sell, I am told by a friend who works in commercial property, what is described as ‘lifestyle merchandise,’ which is a phrase that I cannot say out loud without my face making an involuntary expression. There will be Edison bulbs. There will be exposed brick. There will be a single, sad pot plant in the corner. The clientele will be young, and not from the neighbourhood, and will not stay long.

I am not, dear reader, against young people. I am young, by the standards of Reg, and middle-aged, by the standards of my own back. I am not even against concept spaces, in the abstract. I am against the substitution. I am against the fact that the small civic infrastructure of a neighbourhood, the kind that lets a railway worker and a poet and a barber sit at the same table, is being progressively replaced by retail venues that do not, structurally, have any interest in being sat in.

The Bigger Picture

I have written before, in my previous columns on North London life, about what I think of as the ‘third place’ problem. The phrase was coined, I gather, by the American sociologist Ray Oldenburg, and it refers to the spaces that are neither home nor work but the third thing, the place where civic life actually happens. Pubs, in the UK, have been, for much of the past two centuries, the dominant third place. Their loss, as the research community has documented, has measurable effects on social isolation, on local civic engagement, and on what researchers describe as the broader category of community resilience.

I am aware that this paragraph is more academic than the rest of this newsletter. I am sorry. I am grieving.

What I Am Doing About It

I have, in the past month, started going to a pub two streets over, which is also a slightly grim pub of the same vintage, and which is also, I now realise, in mortal danger. I have, very deliberately, started learning the names of its regulars. I have started ordering my drink at the bar rather than on the app. I have, on at least one occasion, stayed for the second pint when I had not planned to.

None of this will save the pub. The pub will close, eventually, like the last one. The economics will, eventually, get it. But there is, I think, a kind of duty in just showing up while it is still there, in the way that one would visit an elderly relative whose time is short. The pub does not need me to mourn it after it is gone. The pub needs me, while it still exists, to drink in it.

For more of my dispatches from this changing and obstinately beloved city, you can find me at my page on The London Prat.

For satirical takes on gentrification-as-cultural-question, see The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/