on the public house
I’m on holiday in England, where I’ve lived, cumulatively, for about two and a half years, most of which was spent as a graduate student at Oxford and Cambridge. I’m often asked what, if anything, I miss about living here. My answer is almost invariably: pubs.
To be clear, I don’t mean that I miss a particular type of alcohol-fueled drinking establishment. In New York I’m not usually particular about going to a wine bar or a cocktail bar or a sports bar or even a dive bar. Such night-time venues are useful, of course, as a post-work-day gathering place or simply as a perch to people-watch, to take in the rhythms of the city, to experience a certain fullness of life. These rhythms and this fullness take many forms, often more neighborhood- than establishment-specific, and I enjoy partaking in them in their variety.
An English pub is, by contrast, primarily a form of public space, as the very name suggests, and that is what I miss most about them. Even when they serve coffee and tea in the daytime, as well as beer and wine, however, a pub is not simply the equivalent of a café or coffee-house in their typical American incarnation. (Vienna is another matter.) I’ve never once felt out of place reading a book, writing in a notebook, or even typing on a laptop in an untrafficked corner of a pub.
To squat at a table in a New York (or London) coffee-shop, by contrast, is to attune the staff to the opportunity cost of your continued presence. I am continually aware of my obligations in such a place – to buy another overpriced coffee to merit my place, to share my table and not to take up too much room, and so on. Despite this heightened social sensitivity, having a conversation with a stranger is unlikely, especially now that working from home is far more common, and coffee shops are sometimes indistinguishable from co-working spaces. Noise-cancelling headphones have made many public spaces, including coffee shops, feel like beehives, each person engaged in productive activity in a separate cell.
Part of the problem is the typical open-plan layout of an American coffee shop, which simultaneously encourages mutual awareness and dissuades intimacy. To start a conversation with a stranger is to invite everyone else to overhear, perhaps in mild annoyance. Most British pubs instead are laid out like a rabbit warren, a linked set of smaller spaces, spiralling out from the bar. The social architecture of this form of public space is, then, reflected in and encouraged by its physical architecture.
The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), a consumer group and guardian of tradition here in Britain, holds that a pub must allow ordering from the bar without relying on table service as well as drinking-without-eating. (These features strike me as more central than the parallel requirement to serve at least one beer or cider, though of course these play a role in differentiating pubs from both cocktail bars and coffee shops.) Crucially, ordering from the bar allows customers to regulate the rhythm of their own stay, affording the chance both for a quick one and for a leisurely session, where one may or may not be joined by others.
During a busy Sunday roast or a lively summer Saturday, of course, one might need to make way at an English pub. But even in the heart of London, for most of the day on most days, pubs tend to offer an invitingly capacious welcome, with dark corners aplenty for solitary work and social recreation alike – or on a rare sunny day like the one on which I am writing, outdoor space for the same purposes.
I imagine that, later today, people will be spilling out of The Duke of Wellington in Marylebone, where I am writing, out to the chalked borders on the pavement (that is, the sidewalk). Does truly public space begin only on the far side of those borders?
On the far side of the street from The Duke of Wellington stands St Mary’s London, which has an invitingly spacious square in front of its soaring stone tower. In Italy and elsewhere on the European continent, of course, this combination of places to drink and eat and worship, united by a piazza/place/plaza, is central to the organization of public space. Paying establishments populate the edges of many such spaces, yet all of them taken together, along with the central space amidst and at the heart of them, constitute the commons.
Here in England, the unity of public space is more subtle, but the pub as a gathering point is essential to it. Public space, after all, must be largely indoors here, given the frequently dismal weather.
Aside from the fact that one can nurse a half-pint or a lemonade without violating any sort of economic or social compact, the intergenerational mixture in the patronage of most neighborhood pubs testifies to the welcome they offer. On weekend afternoons, especially, it is common enough to see a span of seventy years or more from youngest to oldest.
Class, that ubiquitous feature of British life, does of course shape the social expectations in pubs, though I find it to be more visible in the bucolic outskirts of Oxford than in the urban core of London. From my outsider’s vantage, these expectations seem more to do with whether a pub will be showing the football or the cricket than in the price of a pint.
Many pubs have gone upscale in recent years – in both price and offerings (with some even adding decent vegetarian options to their food menu) – a primarily economic proposition in the face of widespread closures that were accelerated by the pandemic. For my part, I do not tend to enjoy a ‘gastropub’ that is really a restaurant, although the ability to order at the bar means that patrons still control the rhythm of their stay rather than anxious servers. Happily, it is not generally difficult to find a cozier sort of pub round the corner, the sort that might make you feel as though you are out in the country and not in the bustling heart of a city. (One of my favorites that has this effect: The Lamb in Bloomsbury, where Charles Dickens was a regular.)
When I return home, no doubt I will feel, for the span of a few weeks, perhaps even for a little longer than the span of my trip, the absence of the pub as a part of my life. New York offers no substitutes. The closest thing I can think of is Sunny’s in Red Hook, the most perfect bar in the city, which is best known for having folk music six nights a week, but whose combination of gruff hospitality, cheap drinks, and a beautiful little garden place it fully outside the city’s frenzy. Even when we lived a short walk away, however, I didn’t go to Sunny’s all that often for the simple reason that it tended to get crowded.
Can New York just import the British pub? Efforts have been made. The Jones Wood Foundry on the Upper East Side is certainly cozy and even offers a cask ale, but it is firmly divided between a slender bar and an expansive restaurant area, which prevents casual socialization. The Churchill and The Shakespeare, lower down on the East Side, each offer an eerie simulacrum of an English gastropub, but are transformed into typical Manhattan sports bars when their screens are switched on.
These examples – hardly systematic – suggest that cultural importation is difficult, when the expectations and habits of a primarily local clientele largely determine what it possible. While there is a lively expat community in the city, it seems doubtful that there are enough Brits within a short walk of any of these ersatz-pubs to sustain the kind of culture of socialization I have described above. And it is this culture, the pub as public space, that is central to what it is.
To raise the capital for a restaurant venture in a place like New York and to seem likely to attract attention from paying customers, one must offer a vision that is often reduced to a brand. In this language of marketing, only the most superficial qualities can be captured. Building a British pub is reduced to decorating with dark wood, to stocking British ales, and to choosing a name that immediately evokes, to an American ear, its land of origin. So we find The Churchill and The Shakespeare instead of more traditional names like The King’s Arms or The Bear or The White Horse. (I pause to note that the White Horse Tavern in New York’s Financial District is an Irish pub.)
Instead of such superficial imitation, successful cultural translation is instead more like linguistic translation. In a good linguistic translation, we seek words and phrases that present, in the target context, the sense and associations that the original has in its native context. There is no such thing as purely literal translation in the linguistic case.
Likewise, you cannot simply transplant a cultural practice or institution from one context to another. The pub as a form of public space is connected intimately to patterns of movement and settlement, habits of association, and the organization of social life more broadly. Indeed, the decline of pubs in Britain is more a function of these social factors than any purely economic situation. But just as a good linguistic translation can make you feel at home in the thought-world of an author, one can, with particular sensitivity, translate a cultural practice or institution by attending to the principles that regulate its exercise or use.
The central principle, in my view, is gestured toward in another of CAMRA’s requirements for pubs, some of which I noted above, namely that a pub be open to the public, rather than solely to members or to those who pay an entry fee. This requirement points to a mode of hospitality that, while not an essential feature of pubs, delineates the ethical relationship between publican and customers: anyone should be able walk in and feel themselves to be at home, provided of course that they are of age and behave decently.
Equally, those behind the bar are not servants (or even servers), but chief stewards of the public space. Their work is not to extract as much income from you as possible, but likewise, as a customer, one does not simply make demands of them to attend to one’s desires. These are normative ideals that are perhaps not always observed even in British pubs, but could in fact be encouraged anywhere.
In fact, the closest approximation to the atmosphere of a British pub that I know in the city is actually a simulation of a German beer-hall: DSK in Brooklyn, which is one of the few places in New York to which I have invited a slightly indefinite group of people without worry that we would be turned away or unable to sit together or hovered over by servers making sure we were earning our place. Unsurprisingly, DSK is short for Die Stammkneipe, quite literally ‘the local pub’ in German. DSK’s location at a triangular intersection in Fort Greene, with outdoor space on either side, replicates some of the rabbit-warren-like quality of the British pub that I described above, though its design depends on the relatively greater prevalence of sunshine and the interior is a unified space, like a typical restaurant in New York City.
My yearning for the British pub and its particular form of public space, then, is ultimately not a desire for cask ales or dark wood, though I do love these, but a desire for a mode of hospitality, that dual virtue of host and guest, that is difficult to cultivate outside actual homes in New York City. This mode of hospitality orients us away from consumption to co-presence, even when consumption remains in the background.
A pub has to pay its bills, of course, but it cannot operate with the urgency of a typical New York establishment, either. Nor can its patrons wish to be in and out as quickly as possible, treating food and drink as necessities and not part of the substance of shared life.
Thanks to the following pubs for either supporting or inspiring the writing of this essay: Gunmakers, Marylebone; The Jackalope, Regent’s Park; The Gallery, Pimlico; The Duke of Wellington, Marylebone; The Priory Tavern, Kilburn; The Carlton Tavern, Maida Vale; The Old Tom, Oxford; The Royal Oak, Oxford.