In the dead of English winter, there are few things more precious than a quiet pint. An exploratory trudge of the streets orbiting your zone two flat reveals a pub in which you’ve never set foot before. From a distance, it looks like the perfect place to take refuge. The Victorian exterior is promising: a warm, dimly-lit grotto awaits, flooded with red and gold carpet and elderly drunks.
On entering, however, you find yourself somewhere else entirely. Not only are you not in a pub, you’re not really even in London anymore. It takes a few moments to take it all in: the loud music, the neon beer signs, the unexplained corrugated iron. Eventually, you work it out: geographically you’re in London, but spiritually, you’re in a dive bar on the outskirts of Jerkwater Springs, Michigan. On the wall there’s even a sign that reads ‘3,948 miles to Chicago’.
As you settle in under the blaze of neon with a foaming goblet of British-brewed Spanish-flagged lager, you begin to wonder what the hell is going on
To make matters worse, beneath all this yankery remain the vestiges of an old Victorian pub. On the other side of the room, there’s a tiled mural, depicting a scene from a Shakespeare play. As you settle in under the blaze of neon with a foaming goblet of British-brewed Spanish-flagged lager, you begin to wonder what the hell is going on.
This isn’t a scene from a nightmare; it’s a pub in Peckham called The Red Bull. What frustrates me about The Red Bull is that it’s been made into something that should never have existed in the first place: a dive pub.
It goes without saying that the dive bar and the public house are two completely different styles of drinking establishment. I have no problem with either independently, I just don’t believe they should – or can – be mixed.
Pubs, above all, are places to go to be left alone; to escape unwanted company or to have rambling conversations with friends or complete strangers. There shouldn’t be music (unless it’s live). The food should be cheap and unostentatious. The décor should be reassuringly tattered, and comfortingly dated. Ideally, some of the beer should be served at room temperature. Dive bars, on the other hand, are supposed to be loud, raucous joints, for hard drinking in large groups.
But perhaps most of all, pubs should have a distinct sense of history and of place. When one orders a pint at the bar, there needs to be a feeling that people have – possibly for many hundreds of years – come here to do precisely the same thing. All the features mentioned above – the décor, the beer, the food – should be roughly local to the area in which a pub is situated. This is the case for exactly the same reason British and Irish pubs are difficult to replicate abroad: because while cultural signifiers and tropes can be easily reproduced in a different location, they seem inauthentic when divorced from their original context. This is also why other kinds of pubs that work in Britain – Desi pubs for instance – would appear strange if transplanted into another context.
While the degree of yankification The Red Bull has undergone is unusually egregious, it is representative of a broader and accelerating trend that is sweeping pubs in Britain. There is no shortage of pubs that play deafening music, dish up greasy American slop, and haven’t served proper hand-pump ale in over a decade. The worst part of it all is that such places are popular. But perhaps this fact goes some way to explaining the trend’s origin?
Everyone knows that the pub trade is under financial strain: could it be that rising business rates and dwindling custom are forcing pubs to become more American? If so, they are maximising consumption at the expense of culture and history. Loud music is thought to encourage patrons to drink faster, and thereby buy more pints. Is it possible that the cultural concussion one experiences when entering a pub filled with neon and signposts to places in far-off lands is similarly part of a deliberate tactic, to confuse punters into spending more money?
Still more concerning – and equally plausible – is the idea that many pubs are being pulled along with the prevailing westward current of British culture. As our politics, economy, music and geopolitical situation become increasingly corrupted by American influence, surely it makes sense that the places we drink will eventually show signs of the same sickness? Either way, the best way to protect your beloved local from the rising damp of Americanism this year remains the same: sack off dry January, and go for a pint.
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