Pubs: A Good London Lite Draft

This blog will take a while.

The quint essential thing for tourists in Britain involves going to the nearest pub, ordering a beer and some traditional British food like “Fish and Chips” or “Steak and Kidney Pudding.” I personally like the idea of fish, chips, and a good lite draft beer, but it can be a little embarrassing behaving like a tourist when you have a British Accent. So, I took some Americans to the pub to make me look like a good person and to make them look like good tourists. I’ve now done that twice and to be honest, the first time wasn’t great.

Statistics show that since the century began around 10,000 pubs have closed down due to smoking bans, high taxes on alcohol, and an increase in the number of restaurants that serve better food for a lower price. The fact remains that the when an American (his name was Sam) and I went to a pub, our pints cost me £8 ($12.96). Thirteen dollars for two pints of Beer! Still, at least my American friend got the second round and we didn’t have to tip. We didn’t get a menu at this pub; we got a piece of green paper with overpriced food on it. The fish and chips we both bought cost £10.50 ($17.01) and bigger portions are easy to find. No wonder pubs are closing if they have to charge that much for so little.

The whole affair proved very disorganized to the point that a restaurant owner in the US would have had a nightmare of a time keeping track of everything. You could pay as you went or set up a tab (a handwritten paper bill that can probably get lost very easily). Pubs also lack any sense of uniformity. Servers sometimes look like customers and the tables and chairs are all different. Unprofessional might be an understatement… which is fitting considering this is Great Britain. I’ve been to three other pubs at this time (which had better and cheaper food than the first pub I went to with the American), but disorder was the order of the day wherever I went. And this theme held true when I started travelling through London.

Pubs are really just a metaphor for London: disorganized and quite possibly overrated by foreigners. Manhattan suits people with OCD very well, what with its perfectly straight and properly numbered roads. London probably wouldn’t. The city of London considers strait roads a novel concept. The roads enjoy twisting and turning and veering in another direction entirely at the nearest roundabout (aka traffic circle). And the straight streets like to change their names for no particular reason whatsoever, they just do. Albert Embankment turns into Lambeth Palace Road at a roundabout where you can also turn onto Lambeth Road and Lambeth Bridge. You can travel on the Strand, Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill, and Cannon Street without ever turning left or right. Who thought this was a good idea! Actually, no one really, which explains the state of London. Londinium may have been planned, but contemporary London just sort of happened. Buildings that once housed the British government and the Royal Navy now host the London Fashion Show. People built houses and palaces where they wanted and then roads were inserted in the leftover space as far as I can tell. And I think governance and culture has something to do with it.

The French are very proud of their large straight roads that were planned very well under Napoleon III, France’s last absolute monarch. But they only exist because the French government could do as it pleased without any opposition from the masses whose houses had to be destroyed to make way for the Champs-Élysées. The British Monarch would never have been able to get away with such stuff due to the nature of Constitutional Monarchy.  By modern standards, people would not consider British parliamentary democracy a democratic body, but rather a way for the rich to control the country and annoy the king or queen. If enough rich people didn’t want part of their constituency moved to make way for a new road then grand infrastructure projects didn’t get passed. And the rich didn’t bother with roads since parliament was much too busy running an empire to concern itself with London. That sort of thing got left to others. The one time they did get involved in London’s infrastructure in the 19^th century concerned the sewers and they only addressed that because no one in Parliament could stand the smell of the Thames. The result: London just grew naturally.

It is confusing and disorganized and I love it (in part because you feel you deserve a medal for getting anywhere). And that is why I am going to the pub this evening.