Thursday, seven o’clock, Hackney. The Spurstowe Arms by London Fields is already wedged.
Pints of Guinness settle in neat little parliaments; the glasswasher’s cycle ticks like a metronome. A bartender chalks a menu – FROZEN MARGARITAS £10 – TOMATO ANCHOVY PIZZA £16 HOT HONEY + £1 – 2 HOUR WAIT – and hangs it above a pile of lime wedges sweating in a plastic tray. Car Seat Headrest’s It’s Only Sex is playing, though you’d be hard-pressed to hear it over the mustachioed man in a suede jacket at the far end of the bar who is currently declaring that the Gallagher brothers’ recently buried hatchet ‘could yet rescue the nation.’
But I haven’t come to the Spurstowe for his Britpop promulgation, or the pizza with its one-quid hot-honey drizzle, or even for the Guinness, however reputable the pour. No. What I’ve come for is harder to admit but easy enough to see: the hope that crossing two postcodes – sometimes 40 minutes on the Overground, sometimes a trudge across town in the rain – might yield a number, a kiss… perhaps something more. It’s astonishing what distances we’ll endure for the vague prospect of romance – miles we’d hesitate to cross for birthdays, housewarmings, or the slow death of friendship.
Recently, London’s other theatres of desire have lost their glamour, their scripts stale and spotlights unforgiving. Clubs have become overpriced, strobe-lit school discos; dating apps have reduced courtship to a form-filling exercise, each prompt triter than the last. Even respectable hobbies – running, ceramics, sea swimming – have been conscripted into shyer yet sluttier forms of speed-dating.
The pub, by contrast, still trades in plausible deniability: the illusion that you’re only here for a drink, not for the hunt. Unlike clubs or apps, you can insist that you stumbled into intimacy by accident. The whole institution is built on this social sleight of hand – an insistence that you’re ‘not looking,’ even when you very much are. A pint is no longer just a straightforward route to drunkenness; it’s a prop, an alibi, the minimum ticket price for standing in a heaving, sticky room where something – or, rather, someone – might happen. And that possibility is all the more charged because, by design, pubs are conservative social spaces. You’re meant to keep to your friends, stick to your drink, avoid strangers’ eyes. The codes don’t encourage mingling – yet many still go half-hoping for a break in them.
This is what the pub has become for a certain kind of Londoner: not the sticky-carpeted local of yore with their tea-towel-swabbed pint glasses and flickering slot machines in the corner, but a chosen local. One that offers you the chance of a kiss, a number exchanged, or, at the very least, a love story so good it becomes pub lore.
‘Me? I wouldn’t say I’m quote-unquote looking for love, if that’s what you’re after,’ says Tom, a ridiculously tall 30-something musician with a plastic cup of lager at Peckham Arches, the beer garden under the Overground tracks. ‘But I guess I do keep showing up. Because something might happen. Could meet the love of my life. Or, more accurate, actually – someone else who I’d be delighted to let ruin it.’ He pauses. ‘But if it doesn’t, or I don’t… at least the pints are cheap. And I don’t mind the long tube back to Canonbury – I do my best thinking on the Windrush.’ He says this like it’s nothing, but Canonbury to Peckham is 40 minutes on the Tube – a serious commitment for a man who swears he isn’t ‘looking for love.’ Indifference doesn’t usually travel that far south.
Later that week, outside the Prince George in Dalston, Talia, a 28-year-old production assistant, holds a cigarette she doesn’t seem especially committed to smoking. She and her friend Caoimhe, 29, a digital marketing executive, tell me they’d deleted all dating apps (‘both Hinge and Raya’) last month.
