Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the pub, Westminster Council's new draft proposals for pubs in some of London's busiest areas have sparked a familiar feeling. The plans, which cover areas like Soho and the West End, target 'vertical drinking'—better known as standing up in the pub. They encourage licensed premises to stick to table service, limit excessive drinking, and avoid customers congregating in outside spaces.
An Unlikely Ally
As a dedicated 'pintsman', you might expect me to be aghast at this proposal from a local authority often labeled as London's designated fun sponges. I'd be in good company, with Sadiq Khan, publicans, and basically everyone on Twitter apoplectic at the policy. Tory Council leader Tim Barnes is at pains to stress it is not, as has been suggested, a ban on standing in pubs or at the bar.
But to the shock of friends and colleagues, I'm actually all for the proposal. I'm an unlikely ally for Westminster Council. Go on, Tory Tim. You tell 'em. Because as annoying as it would be to be back scanning QR codes on a dirty table and constantly looking for your drinks being delivered by a waitress like a hungry child at a family dinner, bits of this policy would drastically improve drinking in the capital.
Ending the Scourges
In one fell swoop, it could get rid of the twin scourges of people queuing in single file at the bar, and, even more annoyingly, people spilling out of pubs all over the city's streets. I don't say this as a driver, but as a pedestrian. I first encountered this painful reality when my commute changed and I had to spend the winter walking past the Churchill Arms pub in Kensington.
If you've never been, it's basically a West London version of the Devonshire, all Guinness and selfies – it seems pleasant enough, even if I'll always be slightly confused by a Winston Churchill themed Irish bar that flies the Union Jack and the Tricolour alongside each other. It's incredibly popular – so popular in fact that the gastropub across the road seems to be sustained entirely by spillover from the Churchill.
The Pavement Pinter Problem
Every day of that winter, the simple act of walking from the office to the tube became an endurance challenge – if I wasn't being forced onto the road by pavement pinters, I was zipping in and out of them like a Guinness snob version of the gauntlet from Gladiators. Of course, drinking out the front of a bar that doesn't have a beer garden seems fairly routine in central London, but when a pub gets busy, it gets ridiculous, and the area that can be defined as 'outside' of a given establishment becomes so large as to be preposterous.
Some of the roadside revellers I was forced to dodge outside the Churchill Arms were so far from the place they could barely be considered in the same postcode, often crossing the street beer-in-hand and nearly being run over in the process. Maybe that's why they fly both British and Irish flags, because on current form you could be standing on a pavement in County Cork but still declaring yourself 'outside' the Churchill Arms.
The Devonshire's Hordes
The Devonshire, which is perhaps the bar Westminster had in mind with these proposals, is even worse. The bouncers outside that famous hostelry now resemble the professional pushers who operate on the Tokyo subway, physically moving back hordes of Guinness drinkers who risk colonising the entirety of Soho. For a man so committed to pints that he occasionally gets tennis elbow from lifting them to his mouth, you'd expect me not to be opposed to anything that restricts drinking. But these pavement drinkers are going too far.
Lime Biking through the city en route home also involves dodging hordes of bankers in Charles Tyrwhitt shirts an indecent distance from All Bar One as they recount their latest deals and how Industry is basically a documentary. I can't even bring myself to get angry at the single file queuers anymore. I knew that battle was lost when I found myself in a cavernous city centre Wetherspoons in Bristol and an entire hen do had lined up from the bar to the door, ignoring the self-evident truth that bars were invented to stand at.
Hope for Action
That's why I'd be opposed to 'banning punters from standing up or ordering at the bar' but it doesn't seem that Westminster's draft proposals say that. But I do hope the backlash doesn't let them shy away from taking action on pavement pinters and single file queuers. And so I'll keep uttering perhaps the most unlikely sentence to ever cross my lips – 'I'm in favour of this anti-pub proposal from a Tory council.'
