Pubs

The Camden Eye.

The Spread Eagle, Camden Town.

The World's End, Camden Town

The Boston.

The Mortimer Arms, Tottenham Court Road.

The Nutshell, billed as "the world's smallest pub," in Bury St. Edmunds

The Rising Sun.

British pubs being the fixture that they are, I could have photographed hundreds. We had a pub lunch and some very good local beer in The Vine, in Kentish Town, which, like many now, has become a "gastro-pub" serving fancy - and even healthy - food instead of the steak-and-kidney pies and Cornish pasties of yore. The pubs labeled "Free House" are "free" because they aren't tied to any particular brewery; so that's where you can often get excellent local beers and ales. I know next-to-nothing about British beers, so I won't say any more about that; just that I very much liked every beer I drank there!

Hors d'oeuvres and Guiness, at The Vine

Two pubs were across from each other close to where we stayed. There's an enforced closing time of 11:00 pm, but it was still extremely noisy and crowded every single evening, and the shouting and arguing often went on well into the night. The drinking scene in London is pretty stunning. Because smoking is banned from pub interiors now, the spilling over of the crowds into the streets is even more extreme than I remember from before. Public drunkenness and rowdy behavior are common, including vomiting and pissing in the streets,  especially among (but not limited to) the young, and don't seem to faze anyone except the naive visitor.

We were staying in a lovely B&B in a real neighborhood of North London, rather than the more sanitized tourist areas of posh, central London we had been in previously. That was partly out of choice, and partly because hotel prices were astronomical. And so we got a real view into everyday (and every night) life. There were huge crowds of young people around the tube station every night, but especially on weekends, and a strong police presence. Apparently this has been a favorite site for drug dealing, and the police were cracking down. I wasn't nervous about my own safety, but I was surprised by the roughness of both sides -- the kids, and the police -- and the chaotic atmosphere which, by Montreal standards, seemed to verge on being out of control. I wondered about the relationship of alcohol to the overall social culture, and how this has affected the youth, but the crowds at the pubs were always mixed in age as well as sex, and the people we'd hear and see outside our windows at night were often older.

Camden Town Station at night (click for larger view)

I'm fond of the pubs myself, and was glad they were still in place. London has changed quite a lot since we were there last, about eleven years ago. We found it less quintessentially British, and more global; noisier and more aggressively competitive in the mold of the largest American cities; full of international franchises but studded with exciting new architecture. The food was an international mix, and uniformly terrific; the transit system is huge and works with amazing efficiency. London has always been crowded and seemed even more so. We sensed a vibrant energy everywhere we went, although everyone spoke about the economic problems and great difficulty for young people to find work.

Comments

[Harry]

I started to write a comment saying that whatever else Camden is, it's not exactly a typical London neighbourhood… but it sounded like I was trying to suggest that the UK doesn't have an aggressive, heavy-drinking culture. Or that it's atypical. Which would plainly be ridiculous.

[Harry]

Just to clarify: what I was getting at is that Camden is a bit of a destination within London, a place where people go shopping or for a night out, and it draws people from quite a large area. I haven't been to Camden Lock market recently, but it always used to be the place where teenagers from all round the suburbs and exurbs of London went to buy teenagery stuff. I grew up south of the river and we certainly did.

So what you're seeing in the centre of Camden is a somewhat concentrated, exaggerated version of British drinking culture, because it's one of the major focal points for that sort of thing. So don't imagine that the whole of London is like that all the time. But it's not actually atypical either. Because every town and city all over the UK has somewhere where young people go to drink, and some version of those kind of scenes can be found there, if not every night, certainly on Friday and Saturday night.

[Fire Bird]

ha! I used to work opposite the Vine, and we used to go there for team lunches and after work drinks most memorably on 7 July 2005, sitting outside, feeling the fear, drinking the beer, not really knowing if or how I'd get home that night (i did)

[m]

ooh haven't passed by your blog in a long time... was amazed to seem photies of camden.. one of my best friends lives in parliament hill so I'm often on a 214 bus or c2 zipping up to see her when I'm in London...

[true religion outlet]

I can say that, in the days of going "Clean for Gene," you let the screwballs stuff envelopes in a back room somewhere so that nobody would see them, but that was only a holding action at best. Still, you didn't send the screwballs out to the factory gates for pamphleting, at shift change, because you were kind of hoping to win people over, not alienate them.