‘How on earth did you end up here?’
It was a fair question. On the surface there really was no reason for three lads from Zone 2 to be drinking at The Lighterman, in Barking’s Thames View Estate, on one of the first Fridays of spring. But a pint here, in this majestic 1950s drinking den, had been calling me for some time. I first came across The Lighterman (or ‘The Lightman’, as its Facebook page is erroneously titled) when I visited Thames View to see a pub that no longer exists, The Short Blue. For the past nine months I’ve been documenting the closed or demolished pubs of London on Instagram at @londondeadpubs, a project that has taken me all over the capital: from Edmonton to Eltham, Wembley to Wanstead. And, eventually, to Barking. When I ran through the area a few months back to get a picture of The Short Blue for the account, I went past The Lighterman and was struck by its mid-century form and vaguely threatening aura. I began to wonder what it would be like to drink in the only pub on the estate – an estate already cut off from the rest of London on all sides by the River Roding, an A-road, the Thames and vast swathes of brownfield land. Nightlife on the edges of the city takes on a different vibe to those in the clogged-up inner zones: it’s here where you find the real magic. I drunkenly approximated this to my smoking area interrogator, an amblyopic old boy named Pat, who possessed a voice like football boots on a shingled path.
‘Sure, but how did you really end up here?’
Well, our night began in the Glasshouse Stores in Soho. It’s the archetypal central London boozer – all basement bogs and deep mahogany panelling, but with the draconian trappings of Samuel Smith’s pubs: no phones; no swearing; no alcohol that wasn’t conceived in the villainous depths of the pubco’s Tadcaster headquarters. It was strangely empty for a Friday evening, with just the reliable handful of awkward first-daters, shoppers nipping in on their way home to the suburbs and new media sad lads two pints out from the inevitability of calling it in. But all great journeys have to start somewhere, and not even the mad, shamanic ritual of an Italian backpacker outside furiously beating the ground with a stick and looking us dead in the eyes could quell the good feelings we had about the evening. Three more Taddy Lagers please. And three shots of brandy while you’re at it.
In hindsight, our inability to leave Glasshouse Stores almost scuppered the whole evening. We eventually arrived at Barking station at 10.15pm, late and tipsy, and headed straight to the Spotted Dog to expel a District Line’s worth of piss. The Spotted Dog has been on the corner of Longbridge Road, next to the station, since the 1850s and is the kind of railway-adjacent pub that caters to every type of punter. Karaoke and cheap shots in the evening for the pre-Shoreditch crowd; a quiet lunchtime haven for the Racing Post and Ruddles set. Transient enough that the sight of three half-cut lads walking in late on a Friday night batted no eyelids. Fearing that our standing as Men Who Struggle to Remove Themselves from Pubs might have meant we’d missed the boat, I asked the bar lady what time The Lighterman shut.
‘The where?’
Ah. The Lighterman – it’s a pub just down towards Creekmouth, and you see we’re going for an article and, well, we were wondering what time it shuts and –
‘Oh… really? Andy, The Lighterman? What time do you reckon it shuts?’ she bellowed at an older man who had been staring serenely off into space for the past two minutes. Andy seemed to think midnight, but questioned why on earth we wanted to go:
