Two pints of lager and a view of St Paul’s: the secret life of London’s most thrilling boozers

W hen you stumble out of the medieval warren of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub on Fleet Street, it’s easy to think you’ve had one too many. As you gaze east towards the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, the skyscrapers of the Square Mile appear to lean back in a woozy limbo, as if lurching to get out of the way.

It’s not the effect of the real ale, but the result of a curious planning rule. The City of London’s policies have long specified the pavement outside this particular pub as the hallowed spot from which Wren’s dome must be perfectly visible against the sky. Even the towers that stand behind it to the east, like the Cheesegrater and the Scalpel, derive their strange chamfered forms from having to preserve a sacred gap behind the cathedral’s silhouette, when seen from outside the pub.

Trace the lines of London’s historic protected views, and you’ll find that many of them end up outside pubs. It reflects not just the fact that the surveyors enjoyed a pint or two, but the central importance of the public house in shaping the history of the city – a phenomenon that is celebrated in a new book.

“There are already so many books about pubs,” says David Knight, co-author of Public House with Cristina Monteiro. “We wanted this one to be different. It’s not a guide to the best places to have a pint but a collection of social and cultural histories, trying to bring together a more diverse range of voices to explore the value of pubs to the city and society.” While the majority of pub literature may be of the stale white male genre, this compendium includes South Asian Desi pubs, African-Caribbean pubs, and a range of pubs that have played a role in LGBTQ+ history.

Knight and Monteiro, who run the architecture practice DK-CM, have a longstanding interest in pubs, as more than just places to drink. I first met them a decade ago when they were busily campaigning to save their favourite boozer, the Wenlock Arms in Hoxton, from being flattened by a housing development. Its special value, they argued, lay not just in the convivial island bar, jazz pianists and eclectic range of clientele, but in the upstairs function room that served as a vital space for the community, from hosting birthday parties to meetings of the British Stammering Association. The campaign mostly succeeded: the pub was saved from demolition and it is thriving under new management, although the upstairs room was lost to flats, which now also hem it in on all sides.

In an unusual move, the authors have used pubs as the theme for their architectural teaching, running design studios at Kingston University looking at what lessons these spaces might hold for the design of sociable public buildings. Their students produced meticulous drawings of pub interiors (some of which feature in the book), and they even attempted to have the London Public House, as a “type”, listed by Unesco as a site of intangible cultural heritage. As Knight said at the time: “When you talk about a special pub and what’s unique about it, it suddenly seems a bit futile to only protect the physical elements of the building, without thinking of who uses it and for what.”

So what makes a pub special? Monteiro puts her finger on one particular quality in a conversation in the book: “You can feel cosy, but you’re part of something bigger.” In other words, you can sit in a booth or at a table, alone or with friends, yet still feel part of a larger communal conversation. As fellow tutor Eleanor Suess adds, the pub’s strength is “the combination of being able to be secluded and quite private while also being in a public space. The hints of domesticity while being out of the house.”

Published by charity Open City in time for this September’s Open House festival, the book is well timed to tap into our collective thirst for conviviality, after being stuck at home for 16 months. Even if you’re not ready to brave the sticky carpets and pork scratchings quite yet, the book provides a wonderful armchair pub-crawl.

Featuring more than 120 pubs across all 32 London boroughs (and the City of London), arranged chronologically – not from when the pub opened but from “when it had the most interesting story to tell” – the compendium is also dotted with 15 essays from a broad range of contributors. From musician Bob Stanley on the role of pubs as vital platforms for young bands, to the Queer Brewing Project founder Lily Waite on queer pub culture, to MP Rupa Huq on the suburban pub in pop culture (including the inimitable Queen Vic), it is an eye-opening range of personal stories and musings reflecting the diversity of what pubs mean, and have meant, to different communities.

Historian Laura C Forster has contributed a piece on the role of pubs as hotbeds of radical politics in the 1870s. For the political refugees from the Paris Commune, for instance, the Blue Posts pub in Fitzrovia provided “an informal political forum, a cosmopolitan debating society, a mutual aid association; it was a jobcentre, a library, and a reading room.” In a world of short-lived political organisations, she argues, pubs provided the informal conversations, the heated debates and the intimate gatherings that were crucial to the development of socialist ideas in Britain.

Taking a more architectural look at the Jerusalem Tavern (a favourite hangout of Clerkenwell’s design crowd), one section discusses the particular spatial qualities that make it so appealing. Timothy Smith comments that what the tavern gets spot on is “a balance between artifice and anthropometric dimensions”. By which he means, it’s pleasingly small. “When busy it gets tight at the bar but there are nooks where you can comfortably sit in corners and glazed screens that compartmentalise the place.”

It is the archetypal ye olde London pub – and perhaps all the more surprising that architects love it so much, when you realise its authenticity is paper-thin. The building is 18th century but it was only opened as a pub in 1996 by John Murphy, a branding consultant noted for christening the Hobnob biscuit. “It’s a really beguiling 1990s fake,” says Knight, “and I mean that as a compliment.”

What really comes across in the book’s neon-tinged 200 pages is the dazzling range of establishments that are still around, despite all the headlines of pubs being endangered. Whether describing majestic Victorian gin palaces, 1920s taverns in the much-mocked “Brewer’s Tudor” style, modernist postwar estate pubs, or contemporary community-led micropubs, Knight and Monteiro have an infectious enthusiasm for their subject – perhaps second only to Ian Nairn.

The acerbic architecture writer famously drank himself to death, and his 1966 guide to London features no fewer than 27 pubs, where his lubricated prose was often at its most enthused. He picks out the Barley Mow in Marylebone, a personal favourite, which perfectly embodies the pub’s unique combination of enclosure, sociability and privacy. In an exceptionally rare survival, the bar still features a pair of “drinking cubicles” with high wooden walls, forming little secret three-sided rooms opening directly on to the bar.

Perching on a stool here feels like sitting in a secluded theatre box, the stage replaced by the theatre of drinks being served in your own private world. The partitions were apparently installed in 1791 so that farmers could sell goods unobserved, but in Nairn’s eyes they are “places for romantic indiscretion or flogging atomic secrets”. Surely the hallmark of every good pub.

Public House: A Cultural and Social History of the London Pub, by Cristina Monteiro and David Knight, is published by Open City.