Bottoms Up!
Kate McDougall is glad to be back in the pub
IAM fairly confident that if England had a written constitution, a list of laws and commandments drawn together by the country’s great and good that helped to define who we are as a nation, the right to go to the pub would be on there – possibly next to the freedom to vote and the importance of a mid-afternoon cup of tea.
The pub is our second home, an extension of our living-rooms, a place of familiarity, of friendship and of comfort. It is a place to air grievances and to celebrate achievements, to drown our sorrows, eat our roasts and to put the world to rights. The pub is, quite simply, a part of who we are.
Perhaps this is why their post-lockdown re-openings were so highly anticipated. Everyone from the Prime Minister to Prince Charles enjoyed a pint to celebrate the easing of COVID restrictions. We could quite reasonably put up with a number of other social limitations, but the shutdown of our pubs felt like one of the biggest sacrifices. Diarist Samuel Pepys wrote in the 17th century that our public houses were “the heart of England”. Their recent closure, and their eradication in some rural areas over the past decade or so, shut off vital community lifelines. The old saying that, “You don’t know what you have until it has gone”, has never been truer for our public houses.
There have been pubs in England for almost as long as there have been thirsty people. With each new gang of conquerors to land on our isle, from the Romans, on to the Saxons, Jutes and the Vikings, the tavern, inn or alehouse (collectively becoming “public houses” during Henry VIII’s reign) evolved. Ale was brewed locally across the country, and despite the Romans’ lingering influence and their love of the grape, the pub was really a place to drink beer – and still is.
Beer is in our veins; it flows through the course of our history. Much of our culture and our past can be gleaned from our pubs, not just in some of the preserved buildings, but in the names of the inns themselves. Each one gives a little nod to its history. Names with a religious slant, such as The Lamb and Flag or The Bell, indicated their close proximity to a church or as a stopover for pilgrims, while any pub called The Coach and Horses would have been near a turnpike road. The White Hart (one of the most common pub names in England) was the badge of Richard II, and indeed any pub called The Crown, The Queen’s Head, and The Royal Oak were all showing their allegiance to the monarch of the day.
The more unusual names reveal the most about our “Englishness” – our humour, our enjoyment of sarcasm and our appreciation of the absurd. The Snooty Fox, for example, a pub in Gloucestershire, was named after the owner was banned from the local hunt for being “too lower class”. The Nowhere Inn was apparently coined so that punters could “truthfully” respond to their wives about where they had been. No explanation is needed for pubs called The Honest Lawyer or The Honest Politician.
The funny thing about the pub is that it allows the English to engage in some quite uncharacteristic behaviour, our established social norms somewhat reinterpreted, or even disregarded.
Our love of queuing, for example, the adherence to a straight and ordered line, is flat out rejected in favour of a looser, bar-based arrangement where your ability to catch the bartender’s eye puts you out front.
Chatting to strangers is somehow acceptable within a pub’s walls and is, in fact, customary. The buying of rounds, the enthusiasm for pub games, the overall egalitarianism and bonhomie of the place is all quite unfamiliar to a standard Englishman, yet there we all are, clambering to get inside. Perhaps it is the escapism that appeals so much to us?
Sadly, there has been a decline in recent years. Thousands have closed, with everything from the rising costs of business rates, the stranglehold of breweries, the wellness movement, Netflix and the price of beer itself all being blamed at one point or other. Pubs are having to diversify in order to keep up with changing tastes of a more discerning clientele, offering good food, good wine, craft beers and a selection of gins to keep their customers happy. The pandemic taught all of us to improvise, to make the best of a bad situation, and the evolution of the pub may well be its saving grace. Early signs have been that our public houses might well be having something of a comeback.
As we all got together again, with a renewed appreciation of how crucial our communities are, perhaps an epiphany came amid the frothy ale and sticky beer mats – how, without our pubs, we’d been missing a key part of what makes life worth living.