Quotulatiousness

August 24, 2022

“A spectre is haunting Britain – the spectre of whingers”

Filed under: Britain, Business — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A pub that was partially an inspiration for George Orwell’s description of the “perfect pub” is under threat from post-covid NIMBY complaints:

Google street view of the Compton Arms in Islington.

George Orwell’s favourite pub could be closed down because four neighbours have moaned about the noise.

A spectre is haunting Britain – the spectre of whingers. The dead hand of NIMBYism is felt on so many of our national crises, from the housing crisis to the “drought” to the energy crisis. The comfortably off classes have fought tooth and nail, all too successfully, in recent decades to block the building of anything – from houses to reservoirs – that might make life easier for everyone else. But their killjoy war on pubs might just be their most grating accomplishment.

The Compton Arms in Islington is the latest pub, still struggling in the wake of lockdown and now faced with soaring energy costs, to be threatened with closure over a handful of complaints. It’s been open since the 1800s. George Orwell drank there and it reportedly inspired his essay “The Moon Under Water”, published in the Evening Standard in 1946, which laid out his idea of the perfect pub. Now it has been slapped with a licence review by the local council after four neighbours complained that it was a “public nuisance” and posed a danger to health.

Given the Compton Arms was just voted the second-best pub in the UK by Time Out, with a review that hails its “seasonally led” “small-plates menu”, it seems unlikely to have become some den of criminal depravity. The furious explanation of Nick Stephens, the pub’s owner, seems more plausible – that some killjoys on this well-to-do Highbury side street got used to the pub being shut during lockdown and are now throwing their toys out of the pram.

“Our managers have gone to extreme lengths and worked their socks off to run the pub considerately (and exceptionally) – in spite of some more than challenging behaviour from some of the four complainants”, Stephens posted on Facebook. “A minority get used to the quiet then decide the pub that’s been there since the 1800s, that is an asset of community value, is now a nuisance.” He says that if this “minority of four” succeeds, the Compton won’t be financially viable “for us … or any other responsible operator”.

This is a story we have seen playing out time and again across the UK. An unholy alliance of whingers and council bureaucrats are shutting down and imposing punishing restrictions on much-loved pubs, stopping them from staying open later or blocking the opening of new venues over often ludicrous claims of noise and disruption. There seems to have been a particular flurry of this in recent months, following the end of lockdown and the entrenchment of working from home.

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1 Comment

  1. The introduction to Orwell’s paean to the perfect pub:

    My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.

    Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of “regulars” who occupy the same chair every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer.

    If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its “atmosphere”.

    To begin with, its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian. It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries, and, on the other hand, no sham roof-beams, ingle-nooks or plastic panels masquerading as oak. The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull’s head over the mantelpiece — everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.

    In winter there is generally a good fire burning in at least two of the bars, and the Victorian lay-out of the place gives one plenty of elbow-room. There are a public bar, a saloon bar, a ladies’ bar, a bottle-and-jug for those who are too bashful to buy their supper beer publicly, and, upstairs, a dining-room.

    Games are only played in the public, so that in the other bars you can walk about without constantly ducking to avoid flying darts.

    Comment by Nicholas — August 24, 2022 @ 11:41

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