Stephen Gardiner

.

.

What’s happened to the pub, that most personal piece of English belongings? The place where you stand up and drink, where there are scrubbed oak benches to sit on, partitions to conceal private conversations, men with pipes and caps, and there is sawdust and beer on wooden floors? What’s happened to those powerful bar tops, the glass flaps over the counter and the bottle-crammed shelves; the complicated cut-glass that fortified you from the fog and the snow, and through which the indecipherable interior form of figures, furniture and lights made impossible shapes from the wet streets outside? What’s happened? – they’re going, or gone, most of them. The great brewers – Watneys, Whitbreads and so on—are disposing of all that rubbish: that’s out now, finished with, they say. That’s dead wood, old hat. We’re living in a Modern Age. Dickens is dead, you know. Did you know that? Well, some people don’t. Anyone would think Victoria was still alive! Good God – there are new materials now. Chromium plate, plastic (marvellous stuff, formica – doesn’t burn). Wonderful new lacquers you can see your face in and, of course, artificial flowers. Last forever. Well, you can’t ​​beat that, can you? – flowers that last forever. The Germans have patented an artificial scent – you just spray it on, each morning – Rose, Gardenia – have to watch you don’t get your sprays mixed up, of course – not that anyone would notice. No, we don’t like bare boards, these days. We have to cater for the Young. Yes, yes, I know what you mean but we don’t encourage that sort of customer any more they’ve got their own pubs to go to this place has changed hands, the street’s ‘turned over’ and that’s all there is to it, we’re afraid.

Drinking’s a business now, not a hobby. It’s double gins not pints of beer we’re after. Why doesn’t someone introduce the treble gin? – it’ll come, sir, it’ll come – amazing how much money there is about – even in the Freeze – just flowing like gin. Yes, we like the place to look friendly – plenty of flowers (and leaves, they make rather a nice dark green variety), and I like pink net formica myself although Market Research generally settles matters of taste. Close-carpeting is best, so warm – avocado, salmon, peach and shrimp are popular colours. And naturally, as you see, sir, we do food now… A little Italian prosciutto? broad beans? a spot of corn? tomatoes? – they’re lovely today, really beautiful. French bread? No?… No, I’m afraid the crabs are just part of the décor. They’re wax. 

Pubs, in fact, are going the way of all those other things one cherishes – the countryside, eighteenth-century bits of towns and villages, and the only sort of structure it seems nobody dares touch are churches and this is probably for some bogus superstitious reason. Otherwise the ghastly formula for modernisation is applied wholesale – a formula which is a middle-class conception of what the twentieth-century is all about, a sixth-hand version of contemporary design, and so far as pubs are concerned the best parallel in the building business is the shoddy reproduction Georgian terrace which contains the latest (and cheapest) thing in aluminium sinks, cookers and the rest. It seems to me that the organisers of these projects are, in general, deliberately out to destroy anything which is unique, unusual or eccentric because they feel such things must conform with their pattern of life – the pattern they understand and which makes them feel safe and secure. Places must be the same. Friends must be the same sort of people, they must wear the same sort of clothes, say the same things.  

If they are not the same, then the friend gets struck off some list or other, and while it may possibly be reasonable to file away people into cabinets with smoothly sliding drawers, such things as buildings and pubs come into a different category. Architecture belongs to everyone and ought to be protected by the few who understand it. Of course it isn’t, because there is no one to do the job, or so it seems. How can you, therefore, expect anything but the destruction of pubs on a universal scale? Pubs are a universal English business. A formula has to be found to fit the majority taste. Something which is much the same – like battery hens and cattle factories. 

The first thing to go, when the formula is applied, are the separate compartments and partitions. In this way the variety provided by different bars – public, saloon, private etc. – is eliminated at a stroke. This happened, for example, at two excellent Chelsea pubs – the King’s Head and the Phene – when they were given the treatment two or three years ago. Both were devastated, both look as though a giant vacuum cleaner has passed over them leaving them forlorn, empty, desperately clean, and with just a few fixtures like a structural column or two. Otherwise everything was sucked out of them—all that was good and of real value like the old bar tops, the high backed wooden seats, the grimy mahogany tables with their curvaceous cast-iron legs, the lovely intricate shelves and polished brass rods and knobs, the dark panelling and even the old men with caps and pipes (imagine them sitting in glittering, close-carpeted no-man’s-land!). How can it happen? – and it is happening everywhere. 

Quite shortly the English pub will be extinct, part of history. The trouble is that the wretched brewers, in their hurry to find a modern equivalent of the traditional interior, neither stop to think nor to find proper architects and designers. Pubs shouldn’t be in the hands of hacks in their ‘interior department’; but then it clearly has not filtered through to them that the contents of these old places do have a value, as any antique dealer could tell them. And instead of rushing ahead with the steamroller that sticks down the rule-of-thumb carpets, wallpapers and plastic tops they should make it their business to discover what the past has to offer in the way of lessons in design and why the kind of plans that were used in the old days were so good, and seem particularly so when set against the dreadful ‘schemes’ that are being done now. It’s no use the customer objecting. (I tried it once, saying angrily, as if I had been tricked in some way: ‘What’s happened here?’ The manager merely said stonily: ‘The customers like it.’) No, it’s up to the brewer. And there are a few obvious arguments that can be put to him. After all, to start with an elementary point, when you are inserting a new inside to a building of quality belonging to a good architectural period the normal and correct procedure is to consider your design in relation to what happens on the outside – the scale, character and proportion of it, the detailing of the windows and so on; and by this I mean the sort of close observation which catches the atmosphere of the design and the period. If instead the inside is considered in isolation – and it is part of an architect’s responsibility to see that the whole of a problem is solved and not pieces of it – then the total result is bound to end as an architectural disaster. 

If you are landed with a Georgian or an early Victorian structure an answer has to be found which is somehow, although by no means literally, in sympathy with it. Should the brewer reject this argument as unimportant he is in fact dismissing something which is fundamental to the making of architecture of any time, and he is not worth talking to. But if he agrees one can go on. And if Henekey’s in the Portobello Road can make a good job of an interior with a few shelves, barrels, and glass-panelled partitions, then surely an architect of today can too – provided he has insight, feeling and some imagination, and is not too conscious of being an architect. 

The main problem is the plan: it always is, in any architectural problem. Once you’ve got your idea for the plan straight you can settle down to filling in the other gaps – structure, materials, finishes and so on. Well, what is the most successful sort of pub plan? And the only possible point one can start from with any design is one’s own experience – what sort of pub plan does one like best? Some pubs are huge and lavishly decorated with engraved glass like the Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane; others are huge but spare in their finishes and resemble great barns which contain things like dart boards and bar billiards; others are small and lavish like the Red Lion in Duke Street W1, or the Victoria in Sussex Place W8, and don’t have darts; others, again, are small and sparse like the Nag’s Head in Kinnerton Street SW1, or The Raven in Battersea Church Road and this one does have darts. But all the best pubs, the pubs which have the genuine atmosphere which is as solid as the people who inhabit them, do possess one thing in common and this is the position of the bar: it is always sited so that, like an altar in a church, it is the focus of attention. It is either in the centre of the whole space or it is arranged so that it forms clearly defined areas around it, and it is so shaped that it appears to personally control these areas.  

From this point on, the plan is developed to emphasise the areas, to increase their privacy and to simplify the control of them. Privacy is an important factor in pubs: the subtle suggestion of a room where there is exclusive service takes one back a bit – to those small inns embedded deep in the country, or within listening distance of the waves breaking, with their high-backed black dining seats – and there is something comforting and a little mysterious about it all, with a vague sense of nostalgia added in, a nostalgia for something remembered from history books and romantic stories and evoked by such details as the barrels at Henekey’s that have the white lettering on them. And this is why these partitions with their engraved glass panels have a real charm. The sense of privacy is complete but you can still see through the smoky glass, enough at any rate to identify a shadowy silhouette beyond. So the ideal plan seems to be, to my mind at least, one where the bar is in the centre (or approximates to this position), and where there are a number of compartments which are separated by partitions which have a somewhat temporary look, but which radiate from the bar. 

We can go on from there. The ideal pub has a low ceiling because this is correct for the scale of the compartments and increases the suspense; you see it carrying on above the top of the partitions which it misses by about a foot, and you wonder what’s going on over the other side. The ideal pub also has some division between the compartment and the bar areas and this is sometimes in the form of glass flaps, as at Henekey’s, or in the form of unaffected but beautifully made shelves such as one finds at the Victoria in Sussex Place, the City Barge at Strand-on-the-Green and the Hansom Cab in the Earl’s Court Road. These shelves are always filled with bottles (and the colour of bottles really does glow, particularly when you think of the different colours of the drinks that fill them) and all kinds of glasses – those huge brandy glasses, for example, which reflect light so admirably. This brings us to the question of display in general. The chief centre for display – in the ideal pub – is right there in the middle of the bar area and that’s where pretty well everything for sale is on show: this is the shop window. This is where labels matter and become, like the lettering and the inn signs outside, the décor. A concentration of labels and calligraphic handwriting can be marvellous. The ideal pub has a genius for the ideal display. 

So it seems that, in the final analysis, the design of the pub comes down to a few known quantities: ceiling heights, partitions, simple country scrubbed furniture or something lavish in leather (whatever the call), shelves and glass, the loving display of a collector and the dominating father-figure, the bar. But there are obviously no cut-and-dried rules. You don’t have to have partitions, and the Hansom Cab, for example, with its irregular, rambling plan manages both suspense and intimacy very well indeed without them. And ceilings can be high provided the total space – like that of the Salisbury – requires and sustains such height. 

And what about the brewer? Well, he might as well know that there are no good modern pubs: the Hoop from Finch’s is absurdly over-elaborate, The Champion is self-conscious, the Hansom Cab is (although well done) a reproduction piece and the Ranelagh in Pimlico is really terrible. For the brewer there are two rules which he must obey if the English pub tradition is to be protected. They are quite simple. If a good pub comes up for redecoration and alterations the best things and the authentic details must be preserved. If a bad pub comes up – and there are a depressingly large number of them – start again from scratch, but with the right architect. 

Lastly, don’t forget the dart board and the bar billiards which the TV set, in some curious, and odious, fashion, seems to have replaced. And no artificial flowers, by request, please. 

.

.

Stephen Gardiner was a British architect, teacher and writer. Born and raised in Chelsea, he wrote regularly for The London Magazine and The Observer.

---

To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.