London: The Biography полностью

A stranger asking directions in 1854, according to The Little World of London, was likely to be told “Straight on till you come to the Three Turks, then to turn to the right and cross over at the Dog and Duck, and go on again till you come to the Bear and the Bottle, then to turn the corner at the Jolly Old Cocks, and after passing the Veteran, the Guy Fawkes, the Iron Duke, to take the first turn to the right which will bring you to it.” In this period there were seventy King’s Heads and ninety King’s Arms, fifty Queen’s Heads and seventy Crowns, fifty Roses and twenty-five Royal Oaks, thirty Bricklayers Arms and fifteen Watermen’s Arms, sixteen Black Bulls and twenty Cocks, thirty Foxes and thirty Swans. A favoured colour in pubs’ names was red, no doubt complementing the analogy in London between drink and fire, while London’s favourite number seemed to be three: the Three Hats, the Three Herrings, the Three Pigeons, and so on. There were also more mysterious signs such as the Grave Maurice, the Cat and Salutation and the Ham and Windmill.

The variety and plentitude of the nineteenth-century pubs continued well into the twentieth century, with the basic shape and nature changing very little, ranging from the munificent West End establishment to the sawdusted corner pub in Poplar or in Peckham. Then, in one of those paradoxes of London life, public houses became more mixed and lively places during the Second World War. The beer may have run out before the close of proceedings, and glasses may have been in short supply, but Philip Ziegler suggests in London at War that “they were the only places in wartime London where one could entertain and be entertained cheaply, and find the companionship badly needed during the war.” There was an odd superstition that pubs were more likely to be hit by bombs, but this did not seem to affect their popularity; in fact, during the forced absence of men, women once again began to use pubs. A report of 1943 recorded that “they were often to be seen there with other women or even on their own.” “Never had the London pubs been more stimulating,” John Lehmann recalled, “never has one been able to hear more extraordinary revelations, never witness more unlikely encounters.”

By the end of that war in 1945 there were still some four thousand pubs in the capital, and peace brought a new resurgence of interest. Novels and films have conveyed the atmosphere of pubs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, from the East End, where the men still wore caps and scarves and the girls danced “holding cigarettes in their fingers,” to local saloons where what Orwell described as the “warm fog of smoke and beer” surrounded the “regulars.”

That emphasis upon conviviality continued into the twenty-first century, with pianos and juke-boxes being steadily supplanted by video games, fruit machines and eventually wide-screen televisions generally devoted to football. With the gradual take-over of public houses by the larger brewers and the establishment of chains in the 1960s and 1970s, however, there emerged a greater degree of standardisation and modernisation from which many London pubs have never recovered. Certain chains, for example, had the ceilings of their public houses smoked or painted brown to mimic the interior of the ancient alehouses, while various nineteenth-century objets and old books were discreetly planted to ensure an air of authenticity. But, of all the cities in the world, artificial history does not work in London.

Among the 1,500 licensed premises now listed within central London the familiar names still exist. Even if there is no real comparison between “London” of 1857 and “Central London” of 2000, it is at least comforting to find a significant number still of Red Lions and Queen’s Heads and Green Mans. “Three” is still a favourite number, from the Three Compasses in Rotherhithe Street to the Three Tuns in Portman Mews. There are no more Spotted Dogs or Jolly Sailors but instead a number of Slug and Lettuces. There are still Saints’ and Shakespeare’s Heads, but there are now five Finnegans Wakes, a Dean Swift, a George Orwell, an Artful Dodger and a Gilbert and Sullivan. The Running Footman is no more, but there are three Scruffy Murphys.