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LONDON PUBS
In a pub in London a pair of men in scruffy
work clothes sit at a small round table
drinking pints of beer beneath a giant
flatscreen TV blaring sports reports. The
bartender climbs up onto a chair to post a notice
in the window: “Drinks £2 from 6am-6pm.” At the
bar, a middle-aged man in a gray suit knocks back
white wine at a steady rate. It’s half past seven in
the morning.
The pub is called The Hope and I’m here with
Bobo, the photographer, because we’ve heard it
serves a great breakfast that’s popular with workers
from nearby Smithfield meat market. We’d
hoped The Hope would be a classic Victorian pub
packed with jovial cockneys enjoying a hot meal at
the end of a long night spent carrying pig carcasses
on their shoulders. In fact, The Hope is hopeless
and lifeless. We’d leave only we’re too hungry,
and so we order the Full English: a breafast of bacon,
sausages, baked beans, fried eggs and toast.
Expectations are low. Looking around the room
it’s a sorry sight, decorated with a faded photo of
Frank Sinatra and a framed newspaper clipping of
Bob Hope’s top 100 one-liners. But then breakfast
arrives – and it’s warm and tasty and comes with
more hot buttered toast than we can manage. We
wolf it down. At the bar the man in the light gray
Breakfast delivery:
It won’t win prizes
for presentation
but The Hope’s Full
English was tasty
We’d hoped
The Hope
would be
a classic
Victorian pub
suit checks his watch, polishes off the last of his
wine, and heads to the office.
THE GREAT BRITISH PUB, an institution that can trace
its origins back to places that provided sustenance
to Romans when they were busy building
roads across ancient Briton, is said to be in decline.
This might seem hard to believe if you are
in London on a Friday night. In Mayfair, for instance,
the Coach and Horses (established 1744)
is packed with young men in pinstripe suits with
Prince Harry grins, while up the street at The
Punch Bowl (established 1750, now owned by Guy
Ritchie, Madonna’s ex) well-fed financial managers
in tuxedos spill out onto the sidewalk. And
yet, according to reports in The Daily Telegraph,
a dozen pubs are closing each week. The British
Beer & Pub Association (BBPA) says about 8,000
pubs have closed over the past eight years.
“Pubs remain the hub of social life in our villages,
towns and cities, but we all have more leisure
options than we have had in the past,” says
Neil Williams of the BBPA. “Our homes are becoming
entertainment zones, with state-of-theart
TV and music systems, and people travel to
other countries more. We are also drinking more
at home. But nothing can replace the pub at the
52 DECEMBER 2012/JANUARY 2013 SCANORAMA