It is unbelievable: unconscionable. Westminster Council is moving against “vertical drinking” in pubs, starting with Soho. It claims drinking standing up is noisy and disruptive. It makes pubs, the council says, boisterous places where customers crowd round bars, get drunk and become pains in the neck in the street outside.
Westminster’s new draft licences would require pubs to be only for seating, to have “table service in place of open bar space”. Pub users should, presumably, sit down, shut up and wait to be served, like decent Westminster people who use wine bars.
The council balks at claims it seeks a ban, but here’s the thing: the reason the council apparently dislikes vertical drinking is the reason Britons have done it for ever. It is liquid sociability. It suits all sorts and ages. It encourages people to chat with strangers, pick arguments, spill beer down jackets and reduce traffic outside to a crawl. No one has to book tables or be turned them away when it is “full”. They can come and go, or stay all day.
British pubs are now closing fast. In the past 10 years roughly one has closed every day, to an all-time low of 39,000. Numbers have taken two big hits. The first was the loosening of planning laws that have allowed the change of use of licenced premises into housing.
The other hit was the Starmer government’s stinging increase in business rates and jobs taxes, with its stamping out of casual youth employment. Some pubs faced bankruptcy overnight.
I have a pub a few yards from my front door. Most evenings the place is “vertically” packed, as is the forecourt and the street outside. The noise is a nuisance to some but it ends at 10pm. More to the point, the pub is a beacon for the surrounding neighbourhood. Old and young, elegant and shabby, British and foreign, all sit chatting inside and out. Argument and laughter echo down the street. They bring it to life.
In the years I have lived in this street, shops, offices and cafes have opened and closed. The pub, a free house, has survived them all. It is a point of reference, a place to meet, a refuge for stray dogs and sometimes stray people. The forecourt offers a gallery to watch the world go by.
When I briefly studied town planning, I now realise we were never taught a breath of sociology. Planning was like architecture. It was about buildings unrelated to the people who might use them. Humans rarely appear in pictures in architecture magazines. It is as if they spoil the show. Hence today, seeing the pub as a community institution does not register in the planner’s rulebook.
If anything is vexing social intercourse at present, particularly among the young, it is the decline in human interaction. The villain of the piece is the mobile phone and social media. My statistic of the year is Atlantic magazine’s report that the number of words people speak every day, from 16,632 in 2005 to 11,900 in 2019. We have turned to silence. Online has replaced conversation.
Experts are rightly calling the alarm. Talk matters to our brains. And that means talk in company. Nor is it just conversation that is important. It is casual conversation with people we do not know that needs mental effort. When Jane Jacobs, the urban theorist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, studied the American street, she noted its role in making people adjust their relations with each other. A chat with an old friend is easy, but with a stranger it is an exercise in community. That is the value of the pub exchange, of vertical drinking.
Some pubs are simply very crowded. Long may they be so. But some are where older people go daily just to be in company. They were well satirised in Wodehouse’s classic Mulliner Nights, where characters named after their favourite drinks swapped anecdotes at all hours, led by “hot scotch and lemon”. These places are in effect A&E departments for the relief of loneliness, the endemic disease of our age.
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As “village” institutions continue to decline, in town as well as country, the church, the old people’s club, the sports centre, the corner shop are all disappearing as places of daily resort. We are retreating into ourselves. That the pub should go too, at the very moment of become the community’s last defining institution, is a tragedy.
Westminster may have problems with what it calls its West End “cumulative impact zone” – what we call crowds – but it should not take it out on the public house. As one pub after another closes at the bidding of the property market, these places should be fostered. They are more than fun. They are the last whirlpools of social connection before we all vanish online.
