A celebration of an establishment in deepest south London with a tricksy landlord and a never-changing clientele. An ode, then, to the beauty of the mediocre pub.
One morning last month, after dropping my kids at school, I bumped into the local publican in the corner shop. He looked pallid and put-upon, which wasn’t unusual, though he said hello with his usual Geordie bounce, and headed straight for the beer fridge. It was 9am.
He teetered towards the cash register, clasping half a dozen Becks Blues between his fingers. ‘Non-alcoholic beers,’ he said with barely disguised contempt. ‘Apparently it’s the new thing.’ Then, a characteristically morose P– segue: ‘You know, I might have to close. It’s empty, even at weekends. I’m taking £200 a week.’
‘Sorry, P–,’ I muttered, suddenly guilt-ridden. ‘I’ll try and pop in on Thursday.’ Then I stepped out of the shop, heading back up the road. A minute later, I passed P–‘s pub: lights out, a sandwich board outside with the previous day’s football game scrawled in chalk. And the prospect of its closure filled me with melancholy.
The Bricklayer’s Arms sits at the end of my road. Sandwiched between two council blocks, it is in many ways a rare commodity: a pub in the London backstreets. In decades past, there were a lot of these establishments, designed to serve the immediate neighbourhood as much as any passing trade. But, in my area of south London, as elsewhere, they have long been a diminishing resource. Venture through the residential hinterland of most areas hereabouts and you’ll be able to spot the relics – some opaque wraparound windows, some pearlescent exterior tiling, perhaps even an old signpost – memorialising premises that have long since been shuttered, gutted, and converted into flats.
If you’re of a certain age, and want to picture what this pub is like, you have only to remember the pubscape of the pre-millennium. Most London watering holes were like this once. Pool tables took up a quarter of the square footage. The same old men mouldered in the same velour seats. Kids were tolerated on Sunday so long as they stayed out of the ‘saloon’, whatever that meant. The word ‘gastropub’ hadn’t entered the lexicon. Pubs were strictly for drinking – bar snacks optional – often to the point of oblivion. ‘The Brick’, as its regulars call it, still retains this ambience: a lonely barnacle on a rock that has otherwise been scoured clean.
At one level, the Brick’s obsolescence is a tale of dispassionate market logic. A bevy of economic forces – spiralling alcohol duties and ground rents perhaps chief among them – spelled doom for this model. Between 2008 and 2018, almost a quarter of Britain’s pubs went out of business, with small, neighbourhood boozers most likely to close.
But more often overlooked are the cultural drivers. Though the British public puts away less booze than it did in the 90s, and is more disposed to enjoy a meal while doing so, getting pissed remains a dominant national pastime. That many of us no longer choose to do so in places like the Bricklayer’s is largely a consequence of changing tastes, and the different value we place on notions of community.
However, it also says something poignant about England’s peculiar malaise. The best way to summarize it is in the form of a paradox. The Bricklayer’s Arms is, by almost any aesthetic or epicurean metric, a dreadful pub. But I will be devastated if it should close.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone to discover that the Brick’s fans and detractors are split along class lines. Most of the regulars come from families who have lived in and around this neighbourhood for generations. For them, the pub is a sanctuary, and a kind of public living room, a defiant vestige of localism in a city where cosmopolitan transience has long been the norm.
For others, by contrast, the pub might as well be surrounded by an impenetrable force-field. In particular, there is something about it that repulses the kind of people – mostly middle-class professionals with young children – who have tended to move here in the last decade. Recently, the mother of my daughter’s friend, knowing that I was familiar with the place, asked me to stick my head in to ask P– if she could use the toilet. Somehow, this constituency has decided that the pub is a last redoubt of a hostile tribe, a place in which they cannot trespass without mediation.
‘It looks unwelcoming,’ they say.
‘If I go in I’ll get looks.’
My counter-argument – that this is more because seeing a new face is such a rarity than any intrinsic hostility – does little to assuage these preconceptions. Instead, this milieu are more likely to drink in one of several mediocre gastropubs dotted nearby. They assume these places are for them not because the pubs are anything special. But because the £7 pints and taxidermied butterflies on the walls are markers of bourgeois belonging.
These two liquids are oil and water by choice. That the newcomers feel strangely repelled by the Brick is based not on direct experience, but on a presumption of antipathy. Most of them have never set foot inside, incidentally. This impression that it is ‘not for them’ is in large part superficial and aesthetic. And the resulting divide is of course self-reinforcing. The devotees’ ongoing patronage of a pub so demonstrably out of time and place betrays their unyielding insularity; the newcomers’ refusal to cross the threshold is evidence of their scorn.
As someone who endeavours to straddle both worlds, I can’t help feeling that both parties bear some blame for this atomisation. But I also have to acknowledge that much of the newcomers’ reluctance to patronise the Bricklayer is fair and understandable. The beer selection is objectively terrible. Tabloid-addled opinions are not uncommon; a hand-scrawled sign in the small rear garden offers the bald request: ‘NO PISSING PLEASE.’ In the afternoons, P– likes to indulge his taste for afternoon TV, meaning you will often enter to find three or four middle-aged tradesmen shouting incorrect answers at The Chase or Tipping Point. This stalwart clientele is diminishing. A photo of one staunch regular, who died of COVID a couple of years ago, sits above the pleather banquette.
A pathological over-sharer, P–, who has run the pub since the mid-90s, will apprise you of his financial difficulties whether you invite the conversation or not. Sometimes, if you’re unlucky, he will fumble under the bar to produce a sheaf of bills. The Sky Sports charges are crippling, he says. The brewery has him over the proverbial. But the truth is that P– doesn’t help himself. Much of the pub’s unviability is his own fault, a consequence of his myopia, and stubborn refusal to adapt. Proffer some remedies for the pub’s woes and he will invariably glaze over, and start reminiscing about its heyday, still incredulous that the world could have left him behind. ‘People drink less now!’ his punters tell him, when he begins one of these dirges. Or: ‘Why would a young person want to drink in this dump?’
When I suggested, once, how easy it would be to pay a local teenager to flog cappuccinos to the dozens of parents doing the school drop-off in the morning, he replied: ‘I’ve got a fucking kettle!?’ This was not meant as a joke. P– does not understand middle-class tastes at all.
And yet. The problem is, this portrait of the outmoded pub approaching its inevitable expiry is only half the picture. Counter-intuitively, The Bricklayers is in many respects a more convivial place than any of the gastropubs – often cynical, identikit, overpriced affairs – that are more popular, and financially viable. It fulfils, in a way that those gastros never do, the Platonic ideal of the pub as a meeting-place for the surrounding community. What looks, at first glance, to be a monolithically male and working-class place is in fact friendly and amenable – at least if, by amenable, we are going by the regular clientele’s readiness to chat and extend pleasantries with anyone who comes through the door. Cross-pub conversation, even on hot-button issues, tends to result in accord, or at the very least, a congenial impasse. When my Jamaican neighbour’s nephew pops in for half a Guinness, he’s received with more warmth in this white bastion than would be possible to envisage in the pine-floored salons nearby.
P– is chaotic and often half-pissed. But he is also garrulous and generous-spirited. He makes an effort to pin your face to a name. He remembers your round. And at least part of his reluctance to make any concession to bourgeois taste and superficiality stems from a legitimate anxiety over dispossessing the punters who have kept him afloat for three decades. Giving the pub a modern makeover might lure in the newbies, but it would also entail forfeiting some of this strange integrity. The fact that the interior looks like a throwback to a time when a pub’s aesthetics mattered less than the people inside is partly the result of his anachronistic sensibilities. But it is also a filtering system. As in: if you can see past the rough exterior, if you suspend your appetite for cosmetic baubles and sit and have a drink here then, irrespective of colour or class or accent, you must be OK. Over the years that I have been drinking in the Brick, I have come to see it as an emblem of something more profound than a soak’s nostalgia for Lost Albion. Its situation reveals the way the era of free-market consumerism – and in particular an abundance of consumer choice designed to play on class distinctions – has ingrained the social divisions it was supposed to mitigate.
What its detractors don’t understand, for lack of trying, is that the pub’s ostensible weaknesses are also its strengths. In a capital city where one is often left feeling that every transaction is calculated to bleed as much from the customer as possible, there is something reassuring about a place where no one tries too hard, and the only crisp flavours are ready-salted and cheese and onion. For its patrons, the pub is a refuge. It is a place to escape from the manipulations and artifice of the world outside. And that is something worth drinking to.
