Is Wetherspoons’ boss Tim Martin the UK’s highest-profile Libertarian?

What you are about to witness is the first of a series of articles looking at that most bizarrely British of phenomena, the pub chain JD Wetherspoons. 

For the uninitiated, or the unBritish, JD Wetherspoons - or Wetherspoons or Spoons - is a chain of pubs with at least one in every decent sized town in the UK. They’re known for their cheap drinks, meals cooked a-la ping (in a microwave), uniformity of design and toleration of drunkenness.

British people absolutely love Wetherspoons. It’s one of the few things that still binds our increasingly divided island together. Whether you are a banker or an unemployed steelworker, you’re probably only a few days away from your next visit to Spoons.

A product of capitalism

At first glance Spoons is the epitome of the globalised capitalist world that created it. The chain was founded in 1979, the year of Margaret Thatcher’s general election victory that hailed the beginning of the age of neoliberalism. It’s the McDonalds or Starbucks of pub companies: they all look the same, they all stock the same range of products (mostly), they’re everywhere, you know what you’re getting from them in a reassuring way. As a text or work of art, Spoons is an expression of 20th century capitalism.

There is something charmingly British about Spoons. It’s a slightly less sincere, more cheap and cheerful, almost ironic, take on the identikit chain restaurant model perfected by American big business. Each Spoons has its own identity and its own charm. They all have names, which usually reflect the area where the pub is based. Somewhere in every Spoons is a board with old photographs of the local area and a few titbits of local history.

Each Spoons also sells a good range of real ale, and did so before it was cool. They don’t build their own buildings and often preserve an interesting piece of historic architecture. Spoons can be found in former cinemas, car showrooms, station cellars, theatres and banks.

Spoons’ charm

There’s an unpretentiousness to Spoons that is a welcome offset to the self-consciously modern aesthetic of many craft beer pubs and beer brands (although there are many places that excel at using this aesthetic). In an age where most pints (especially in London) cost more than £6 and the cost of meals out is forever spiralling, Spoons food and drink is always reasonably priced, usually tastes good and arrives at your table quickly.

There are little things that make Spoons charming, such as the fact that each one has an individual, brightly coloured carpet. This has prompted a blog and a book documenting them. Some Spoons are spectacular. Stand out examples are The Knights Templar in Holborn, London (a former bank), The Caley Picture House in Edinburg (a former art deco cinema) and The Palladium in Llandudno (a former theatre).

It should be said that some are not so pleasant - avoid the Surrey Docks at all costs - they can be dark, grotty and filled with alcoholics that have been barred from every other pub. Despite their surface similarities, entering an unfamiliar Spoons can be a gamble. Somehow this adds to their charm.

The politics of Tim Martin

The Wetherspoons chain is also an expression of the politics of its chairman, Tim Martin. Via the medium of op-eds in Spoon’s slightly eccentric magazine, beer mats and sometimes posters, Martin communicates his political views to a surprisingly large and captive audience. In 2017 Spoons claimed its magazine had a readership of two million, although I take that with a pinch of salt.

Martin has many opinions (a lot of them relate to how his industry should be given tax breaks and what he thinks of government health advice on alcohol consumption) but he is most well known as being a prominent supporter of Brexit. He has been photographed with both Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, he has been name dropped by Farage as a Brexit supporter and spoke before Farage at an event in Parliament Square on the night when Britain finally left the EU.

Martin is not alone in being a pro-Leave celebrity. There were a lot of famous people who backed Brexit from Michael Caine to high profile MPs like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove who have used Brexit to revive their atrophying political careers. However, Martin was different, he served a very specific purpose for the Leave campaign and it has everything to do with the pub chain he runs.

Wetherspoons is in our communities

Martin’s boon to the Leave campaign was not the people he could convince to vote for Brexit via his magazines and beer mats, but as a well-known business leader who was vocally pro-Brexit. The business community was strongly pro-Remain, as businesses prefer regulatory continuity and Britain’s EU membership gave them tariff and bureaucracy free access to the European market, so Martin was invaluable to Leave as a business leader bucking the trend by pushing back against fears of economic woes post Brexit.

As well as showing that business was not 100% united against Brexit, what made Martin helpful for the Leave was the type of business he runs. Martin runs a pub chain, a business that people across the country understood and could see how it benefited their lives. Wetherspoons is in voters’ communities, employing people, providing a space for relaxation and meeting friends. It is a vital part of modern British life and the man in charge of it said that Brexit wasn’t going to wreck all these things.

Bankers and tech companies could come out against Brexit, but this could be shrugged off as they’re all based in London, draw their employees from a small section of society, work across national boundaries in a way that could be described as footloose and do technical things most people don’t understand or see the benefit of. I’m not saying these businesses don’t matter to the UK economy, I’m saying a lot of people don’t know that they matter.

Libertarian Brexit

The reactionary, nostalgic, nationalistic politics of Brexit don’t fit so comfortably with the image of Martin as a man who runs a business that employs a lot of immigrants. It appears that Martin is at heart a libertarian.

The Libertarians (by which I mean the right-wing Libertarians, who love to quote Ayn Rand) most people meet tend to be wealthy and work in industries such as finance and tech (ones that also tended to support Remain). Martin projects the image of a man who is more at home with the left-behinds of the small-town boozer than the jet setters of the international finance and tech world, but his politics have more in common with Ancaps  than provincial Tories.

Lots of Libertarians also supported Brexit on the basis that Brexit was a campaign for less government. However, Brexit was only partly sold to the public as a way to get rid of paper pushing civil servants interfering in the world of business. It was mainly sold as a way to kick out immigrants, give the Europeans a black eye and restore the pride of Britain. “Take back control” could mean taking back control from Eurocrats creating regulations holding back the lion of British industry, or it could mean taking back control of our borders.

Libertarians and social conservatives

Martin was willing to link his Libertarian anti-Brexit stance with social conservatives such as Farage. Farage may be a Libertarian himself - his earlier UKIP manifestos contain the Libertarian dream of privatizing the NHS - but any Libertarian pretensions he had have long since faded to be replaced by a man who spreads misinformation about migrants with HIV and pals up with Donald Trump.

Martin has certainly flirted with the bellicose anti-European rhetoric of the socially conservative Brexiteer, including attention grabbing stunts such as not selling products from the EU in his pubs. However, Martin himself doesn’t come across as very socially conservative. He made pro-immigration comments in a speech he gave in Parliament Square on the night Britain left the EU, which were received poorly by the pro-Brexit audience waiting in the rain for a speech from Farage.

His business employs, especially in London, many immigrants. I’m sure he doesn’t have a BLM poster in his window and he hasn’t pre-ordered Shon Faye’s The Transgender Issue, but I can’t imagine him frothing at the mouth about how awful young people are, as the Spectator does. Mainly because young people are buying Jager-Bombs in his pubs. Maybe he does hate the woke-left, I don’t know him personally, but his Brexityness seems to come from a place of wanting less government, not hating foreigners.

Martin, Carswell and Farage

The politician Martin most reminds me of is Douglas Carswell, the former Tory MP and then UKIP defector who ultimately fell out of favour with his new party. Carswell, like Martin, seemed to be looking for a British Libertarian Party and, finding none, chose one leading the charge to reduce the amount of government in the UK.

The Carswells and Martins of this world could have had their referendum and made a purely Libertarian, anti-government argument, but this would not have won over the majority of the population without the need to link Brexit to stopping immigration and some people’s need to show Johnny Foreigner the middle finger. Farage himself said that linking Brexit to reducing immigration is when the Brexit campaign gained momentum.

Not being a Richard Littlejohn-esque social conservative shouldn’t excuse Martin for all the bad things he has done. Like a lot of Libertarians he treats people with less money (i.e. his staff) badly and would treat them worse if the law allowed it. His comments that his employees should get a job at Tesco’s, when his pubs closed (instead of him paying furlough) during the pandemic, shows a basic callousness to people he is responsible for who were losing their livelihoods. Similarly his angling for his pubs to stay open during the pandemic would have put his employees at risk.

The weakness of Libertarianism

The interesting thing about Martin’s politics is that it shows that, in the UK at least, for a Libertarian campaign to be successful it needs to align itself with a larger socially conservative movement. There isn’t enough support for Libertarian policies simply by themselves. Having less government wasn’t enough to get us out of the EU, but arguments for “taking back control” and against immigration were.

The weakness of Libertarianism in the UK can be seen in the failure of Martin’s other political campaigns. Mainly to secure a VAT reduction for the hospitality sector, a campaign that is so nakedly self-serving you must admire the fact that he argues for it with a straight face. It’s ironic that Martin’s biggest political success will probably hurt his business by making it harder to find staff and source products at the low prices his customers expect. Recently Spoons posted a loss.

The losers from Brexit

I have no sympathy for Martin because of how he treated his staff during the pandemic. It was this, more than his views on Brexit, that has moved him from the silly political eccentric to dangerous ideologue.

Like a lot of people who voted Leave, Martin will ultimately be the victim of Brexit. Whereas the people who used Martin to advance their own political standing, the Johnsons and Farages of the world, will do all right out of all of this. We are no closer to the Libertarian dream of getting rid of the government, and Martin’s tax cut for the hospitality sector isn’t going to happen either, but it will be harder for him to find staff and stock for his pubs.

"80 - Natural Copper Bar Top, Wetherspoons, Brigg" by Metal Sheets Limited is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The Zoom Under Water

In 1946 George Orwell outlined his model for the perfect pub, in an essay for the Evening Standard, which he called The Moon Under Water. This essay describes the ideal London (or any city based) local drinking establishment and it sets the standard for idyllic pubs, as well as inspiring the name of many Wetherspoons across the country.

Orwell’s pub had “barmaids [who] know most of their customers by name, and take a personal interest in everyone” and a design aesthetic where “everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.” Right now, I would very much like to visit a “pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, [and] a garden,” as pub going has been seriously curtailed by the current deadly disease outbreak.

These are dark days for the local boozer. Now that we’re heading towards winter flu season, the Covid-19 infection rate is rising and many parts of the country under are local lockdowns. Another national lockdown or countrywide closing of pubs could happen at any moment, which would be a serious blow to the pub industry, its employees, pub goers nationwide, and my own relaxation.

Even on the few occasions I have been to the pub in the last six months, it hasn’t been as relaxing as it once was. The threat of getting sick and dying does impede my ability to unwind somewhat. I take the risk of catching Covid-19 seriously, and I can see why as a nation we prioritise keeping schools open, but we all need a break from the unending misery of life during a pandemic and now that pub trips are off the menu I feel that I am rapidly losing my marbles. 

Collective online drinking 

This isn’t to say that I haven’t been engaging in social drinking since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, I have just been doing it at home. A drinking session now involves gathering around a laptop with a bottle of beer ordered as part of a Tesco's delivery and dialing into a Zoom video call; whereas before it involved gathering around a small table with a freshly poured pint and looking at the actual, corporeal version of my friends. 

Collective online drinking can take many forms, as can in person drinking. I have attended intimate one on one sessions where we engage in in-depth philosophical discussions, rowdy group piss ups and even online beer festivals. In these Covid-19 times, it seems there is no aspect of collective public drinking that can’t be turned into collective online drinking. 

This virtual pub, that provides so many of the features of its offline predecessor could have many names. The Skype Arms? That’s a little unimaginative. Maybe, The Home and Hounds, which is cosy like a pub should be. Orwell had his Moon Under Water, so for the rest of my essay I will refer to this pub as the Zoom Under Water. 

Enter the Zoom Under Water 

So, we have gone from Orwell’s Moon Under Water to our Zoom Under Water. The Zoom Under Water offers many of the social benefits of an offline pub, such as providing a space for unwinding, socialising and inebriation. It can provide beer and companionship, which is the minimum viable (MVP) product for a pub. 

This concept of MVP is worth dwelling on for a second. MVP is product designer speak for the absolute minimum a user will expect from a product. It’s worth thinking about because most of us don’t spend much time considering the minimum we would expect from a product or a place or a pub. 

Minimum viable pub 

Whenever I pop into a pub for a quick drink, or a long session, I evaluate this against my tastes and expectations. Every pub is compared to my own personal Moon Under Water. This standard is subjective, every pub I go into doesn’t have to conform to my exacting ideas of what a pub should be for me to drink in it. Most places aren’t the maximum viable pub, a high bar that only a few places come to meet.

This is how most of us (or at least those of us who try to think critically about pubbing and/or have a sense of personal taste that relates to where we drink) approach the idea of evaluating a pub. This is difficult when applied to a pub in our own home, which simultaneously conforms to our tastes more than any pub ever could and at the same time is a long way from our ideal version of a pub, because it’s a home and not a pub.

This is why it’s worth approaching the Zoom Under Water the opposite way around. We should start by thinking about the minimum viable pub. What do we need for our homes to be transformed into a pub? I would argue that it is relaxation, inebriation and company. 

The Zoom Under Water vs the Moon Under Water 

The Zoom Under Water can offer these things, without the negative aspects of pubbing such as:  obnoxious drunk strangers, missing last orders, being unpleasantly sobered up by wind on exit or cramming onto public transport whilst resisting falling asleep so that our phones isn’t stolen on the way home.

Granted those are all positives. The main flaw of the Zoom Under Water, and it is a significant flaw, is that it is always the same. No amount of customisable Zoom backgrounds can convince you that you are not always in your home. 

Limited and unlimited choice

This sameness usually means that the Zoom Under Water always serves the same beers. If we order our beer online to be delivered to our homes then we have, theoretically, all the beer in the world to choose from. When presented with this near-infinite range of options, most of us fall back on what we know well. Netflix offers hundreds of thousands of shows, but the most watched shows are Friends and The US Office, because most people are already familiar with these titles. When presented with an ocean of new and uncertain options, we cling to the rocks of what we are familiar with.

The same applies to beer, when shopping online I am more likely to buy Brewdog, Beaver Town or Fullers Beers as I know them well. This means that the Zoom Under Water lacks a crucial part of the pub experience: discovering new drinks.

When faced with a limited range of options, such as the three, four or even ten beers, we are presented with the possibility of trying something new. Sure, some people always order Carling or London Pride, because that’s their drink, but many take this opportunity to broaden their taste. This is one of the great things about pubs, they give us the chance to find new beers for ourselves.

Algorithms and entrenched brands

In the world of internet content this is called discovery. The internet is supposed to be the ultimate tool for discovery and although it does offer people the opportunity to try something they didn’t know they wanted before (have you considered fascism, you might like it?) generally the internet has not opened us to a whole new world of discovery. If anything, it has entrenched the power of established brands that we were already familiar with.

This is because there is so much stuff on the internet that it needs to be curated for us, which is done by algorithms on tech platforms. These algorithms look at what they know about you, what they know about what you like and what they know about what the people who are similar to you like, and then make recommendations based on this. The net result is that the same things that you already like are being constantly fed back to you. 

The impact of this touches everything from the beer that we buy to the news that we read. It becomes dangerous when it extends to our politics. The process of reflecting ideas that we already like back to us means we are not exposed to new ideas or people who think differently to us. By showing us more of what we agree with and less of what we disagree with, we end up in an echo chamber where more and more extreme versions of our beliefs are bounced back to us.

The loss of discovery 

When I am sitting at home drinking the same beers that I like, checking Facebook and Twitter and reading opinions that I agree with, I am left thinking that discovery is something we’ve lost. The internet once promised to open us up to new possibilities, but it has entrenched the power of established brands and established political parties. We’re angrier than ever, but a revolution seems further away than ever. 

The freedom that all the choice in the world should offer has been lost because it is un-navigable and anything built to make it navigable has so far only created echo chambers. The solution to this is to remember to be open-minded, to seek out new experience and views that challenge your own. To keep trying new things. 

Right now, we are stuck at home without new things to try. Apart from being at home all the time, which is new for me at least. However, now that there’s nowhere to go we might as well spend our time trying something new even if it’s small. A new hobby or a new TV show or even try a new beer, rather than always ordering the same ones over and over. 

We need novelty

We need novelty and we need new discoveries, as we have seen the problem with having what we already like constantly fed back to us. This has been the great strengths of off-line pubs, how they allow us to discover new beers by limiting our options. It’s one reason why the beer industry supports a huge diversity of breweries and has become more diverse in an age where large brands are becoming more entrenched. 

The Zoom Under Water doesn’t show us anything new, it only reflects ourselves back to us. That's why we need the experiences that create novelty. In an increasingly online world this is what’s being lost, but if we are aware of this we can seek out novelty and try to add some discovery to our lives.

Image of The Moon Under Water, High Street, Watford was taken by Dr Neil Clifton and was found on Wikipedia. It used here under Creative Commons.

In defence of rainy weekend days in January

On a clear summer’s day, from the escalator on the outside of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, you can see the Eiffel Tower standing proudly over what is a good candidate to be the most beautiful city in the world. It’s the perfect place for an epiphany or to be struck by inspiration. 

I always thought of myself as strange that I was more likely to be inspired by the sheer beauty of the world in a Wetherspoons or walking along the side of a ring road. Maybe that’s just me. These places are as full of life as a Moroccan Bazaar or the Amazon rainforest, but are less likely to be the subject of rapturous descriptions rendered in sparkling prose. Beauty can be found in the magnificent squares or Rome with its steady diet of Renaissance masterpieces or in the sublimity of Niagara Falls, but there is beauty to be found in the mundanity of suburban life, in queues for the post office, or in a round of drinks after work on Friday.

In Britain, there is no truer expression of beauty than a good pub. I have known many good pubs in my time on this Earth, and I can say that there is no formula for creating an excellent pub. George Orwell laid out his ideal pub in his essay The Moon Underwater, which has given its name to many pubs (most of them Wetherspoons). I disagree with Orwell, there is no perfect pub. A great pub is a response to its environment and shouldn’t be measured against a universal standard.

I am a man of my time and a product of my environment, so I can usually be found in a trendy East London craft beer bar that probably used to be a warehouse, with exposed brick and pipes as well as keg beer from a local microbrewery. It’s easy to sniff at these places for being the embodiment of the modern aesthetic, but a pub should be a response to a time as well as a place. 

Another mode of pub that I very much enjoy is the traditional high street boozer, usually with recognizable pub design and names such as the Kings Head, Rose and Crown, or celebrating a local historical figure or event. In recent years I have seen the range and quality of beer and food offered in these places increase greatly. They have always moved with the times to be the cornerstone of British life.

The best of these pubs are friendly, but not so relaxing that you think you’re in your own living room; so please don’t take off your shoes or put your feet on the chairs. They have subtle, inoffensive interior design, great beer and good food. They capture the community, town or suburb they are located in and reflect it back, whilst still being welcoming to outsiders.

These places offer a refuge from the assault of to our mental wellbeing that is the month of January. Why many people decide to quit drinking in the most depressing of months is beyond me. They sit on the high streets of small towns and street corners of suburban sprawl. Many of them are in tasteful Victorian buildings, but they come in varieties from delicate Mock Tudor to modernist cubes with flat roofs. The town centre pub is one of the few things that link us together in an increasingly atomized society.

There is a quiet beauty to the High Street pub that suits its usual understatedness. It’s the same quiet beauty that can be found on rainy weekend days in days in suburban streets. It can be found in a family or group of friends tucking into a Sunday roast. It can be found in weekly shops and car MOTs and the way that fans watching football in a pub can cast aside British awkwardness to share in elation at victory and commiseration at defeat.

This is where the profound can be found on a rainy January weekend afternoon in suburbia. It is on one of these weekends that I write this, in the midst of a local high street pub that serves good beer. People are sharing stories. There are family meals and friends’ reunions. A young couple is having a drink on the leather sofa near the fire. Kids are running around but are closely supervised. American Pie just came on the stereo. The pub is starting to empty out as the sun sets. Work tomorrow.

This is as fine a subject for a painting as the Battle of Trafalgar, and it says more about the Britain that we are than a mythologised naval encounter with the French. Pubs on rainy Sunday afternoons are what brings our country together and we need some togetherness as recent events have done their best to tear us apart.

Recently, I have sensed a rejection of the idea that mundane British life is beautiful. This comes from a mistrust of normal people and their experience by people of my ilk, whatever ilk that is. We used to champion the person in the street against their wealthy oppressors, but since the person in the street voted for Brexit we paused and thought maybe they have opinions that we don’t find so wholesome.

This has led to a mistrust of the person in the street or the pub, usually a Wetherspoons. In many recent political discussion drinking in Wetherspoons has become code for being ill-informed, angry at nebulous elites and probably a bit racist. This is mainly because of the pro-Brexit views of Tim Martin, the chain’s owner. There is more to Wetherspoons than being a vehicle for pro-Brexit propaganda, and not everyone who drinks in one supports Brexit. When we reduce people’s everyday experience to a knee jerk reaction we lose some part of our collective identity.

Some of that identity has informed the collection of anxieties that make up Brexit. The closure of pubs in a local area reinforces these anxieties and contributes to the support for Brexit. Brexit is a nostalgic movement, based on a nostalgia for an idealised Britain and for pubs that are vanishing from large parts of the country. In other parts of the country having new, cool, craft beer oriented bars is a badge of identity as a successful, open and anti-Brexit community. The pub, and how we view it, is key to understanding how we feel about Brexit. 

I’m not denying that the referendum and Brexit are processes designed to divide people and turn us against each other. Brexit is not something that has to be merely accepted. What it is becoming is a culture war, a widening gap between people who share the same streets and pubs. Now we resent anything that smells of that other culture we feel so separated from.

I don’t want to trivialise the important disagreements at the heart of Brexit. I have written about the grave threats to our nation. However, we cannot continue to live as two nations in one land. Increasingly we have come to see each other as different. Not just politically or even culturally different, but different in the fundamental nature of the lives we lead.

If we view our Britain as the one of the exceptional, the cultured, the open-minded, then we cannot help but think of the other Britain as mundane, grey and filled with people ground down by the harshness of the world. If this is how we think, then we will grow to see every day experiences as signifiers of our cultural enemies.

At worst, a dislike of the person in the street could lead to a rejection of the everyday as invalid, a dismissing of the everyday things that bind us together. Rainy Sundays in suburbia are a part of everyone lives, regardless of who they are or what they believe. You can be awestruck in the Pomedu Centre Paris, or in a Wetherspoons in Grantham, but we all experience the same feelings.

I write this on a rainy Sunday afternoon in January in suburbia where our future is uncertain, but we must make sure that we don't turn against each other, dismiss the person in the street as an angry crank and render the everyday experiences of millions as invalid.

I don’t think that the answer to fear and suspicion is more fear and suspicion. We cannot harbor hostility to people who think differently to us or come from different places. I don’t want to live in a divided Britain.

 "The Shepherd and Dog Pub" by lloydi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Haringey: A borough of two halves

The names of the places that make up the London Borough of Haringey are more famous than the borough itself. The same cannot be said for Islington, Hackney, Camden or a host of other boroughs. Tottenham, Crouch End and Highgate are well known, but the name of Haringey is sadly usually evoked with negative connotations. Harry Kane plays for Tottenham and the position of this national hero inside the borough of Haringey has not changed the perception of it.

Outside of North London, Haringey reminds people of either the Baby-P scandal or the battle between local people and different factions of the Labour Party that erupted over the Haringey Development Vehicle. I have especially enjoyed people who couldn't find Haringey on a map of London, opine on Twitter about what events in Haringey have to say about the state of the nation. Have they asked anyone who lives locally? No, that would require actual engagement with the complexities of an area.

After spending the better part of seven years variably living, working, volunteering and most importantly drinking in the London Borough of Haringey, I can say that I find most views expressed by people outside the borough as reductive and lazy. Responding to Haringey, if such a thing was possible, is the same as responding to the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe in one tweet. It's simply too varied to do it justice.

If you want to understand Haringey then I suggest you start by putting some boots on the ground. Take a walk and as we've having a rare spell of unbroken good weather, why not visit a few pubs as you go.

I began at the Green Rooms on Station Road, not far from Wood Green tube station, which is a classic Charles Holden design: geometrically shaped and bricked built. A modern, clean and functional design. The borough has several tube stations designed by Holden on the Piccadilly Line, who certainly the architect to have the biggest impact on London after Sir Christopher Wren.

The Green Rooms is one of the most individual pubs in London. The space reminds me more of East Berlin than East, North, Central London. The large windows let ample light spill in and the exposed brick work and wiring is an excellent execution of the modern ascetic. Art from local artists adorn the walls and there is a rotation of pop up restaurants that occupy the kitten. It goes without saying that the beer selection is very good, local favourite Beavertown Gamma Ray and German classic Paulaner Helles are frequently available. When I dropped by in the middle of the day, there were many people sitting alone at tables working on Mac Books.

So far this may seem so very London, but the Green Rooms is located in area that is subject to an ongoing postcode war that included a young man being disembowelled. I have several anecdotes about the space around Wood Green tube station, but I don't think the area is served by a white middle class man's poverty safari stories. What I will say is a fact: that Wood Green is in East Haringey and the average life expectancy in East Haringey is nine years less than West Haringey.

There is another point here: the mixing of craft beer and gang violence shows the changing face of London. East Haringey may have social and economic problems, but it’s also rapidly gentrifying. You can live a life at the Green Room, Crouch End Picturehouse and Jack's Off Licence (the best offie in the world, and I don't use those words lightly) without interacting with the poverty that surrounds you. I know, because that was my life before I started volunteering. Being a middle class white person or a poor person of colour in East Haringey is very much like living in Ul Qoma or Besźel in China Mieville's The City and the City.

I am trying to convey the complexities of Haringey, and you'll notice that I only mentioned East Haringey so far. After leaving the Green Rooms I hopped on a bus that took me on a tour of Haringey's suburban sprawl. Don't assume this was a bad experience. To summarise Jonathan Meades, sprawl is just sprawl, it can be good or bad.

Haringey has lots of lovely sprawl. There a Victorian terraces that are now blocks of flats. There are rows of small shops that border parks. There is interesting infill, something that I always find fascinating as they ask the question: what was there that needed to be filled in?

The bus took me past 1930s housing blocks that have ornate curved brick balconies and shopping parades where branded stores are being slowly driven out by local cafes/art galleries and interesting restaurants, whose menu can only be described as nationality X, but modern.

The bus ultimately arrived in Highgate Village. Filled with beautiful Georgian houses, which are mind bendingly expensive to own anywhere and in London I cannot imagine the level of wealth needed to purchase such a property. There is a level of wealth above the hipster craft beer drinker and above even the obnoxious City Boys.

Highgate Village does a better approximation of a country village than most other parts of London that have tried this. This is the village that many urban villages are modelled on. I dropped by The Flask, which is very much a country pub transposed to what is still TfL zone three. It has beautiful wooden interiors with nooks and carries that provide privacy. The most interesting part was wallpaper showing facades various buildings made in the neo gothic style. It goes without saying that the beer selection is very good, a full range of Fullers cask ales and craft beer is frequently stocked. There is also a leafy outside area complete with picnic tables that remind me of the canal side pub where I first sampled craft beer as a student.

Highgate Village, with its expensive cars and boutique shops, also has a pedigree for producing the country's poshest leftists. It has been home to both Miliband brothers and to Peter Mandelson (who is technically on the left, at least by this eye-wateringly posh part of the country’s standards). From its position on the side of a hill, Highgate Village commands views across London. On a clear day you can see Anish Kapoor’s Orbital in the Queen Elizabeth Park. From here it is possible to look down on the rest of London in every sense.

Highgate Village may seem more like Richmond, just as Wood Green feels more like Hackney, but the two places are united by being in same borough. A borough many people have tried to summarise glibly. Highgate is as disconnected from Wood Green (socially and politically) as the drinkers of the Green Rooms are from the drug dealers. In London we live shoulder to shoulder with people whose lives are completely unrecognizable to our own. This is something China Mieville understood. We share a space with people who are different to us, but we don't understand them and often we don’t see them. We're more likely to see their lives represented in our media than to engage with them.

The solution: take a walk more often. If you do this in Haringey then don't think of Haringey as a poor place or a place of hipster craft beer or a place full of wealthy people. Think of it as it is: varied.

Between the Mega Spoons and the Brown Jug: A tale of the Kent coast

The writer who best captures the sense of a place is Jonathan Meades, mainly because he brings his own experience of a place into how he captures it. Meades’s writing and documentaries shows that you cannot know a place outside of your subjective understanding of it.

I always thought that if you wanted to know a place in Britain, the best way to start is by visiting its pubs. Pubs reflect the complex web of class, community, politics, history and people that make a town or suburb distinctive.

With this in mind, I headed down to Ramsgate on the Kent coast to visit Britain’s largest pub, the so called “Mega Spoons”, and to see what it can teach me about British’s small coastal town.

The Ramsgate pub scene is dominated by The Royal Pavilion, which was built in 1904 and is now a Wetherspoons. Its presence looms from the front of town, despite it being a low squat building, and all drinkers in the town feel its pull wherever they are.

On the waterfront

The waterfront is lined with beautiful Georgian buildings, which are nice as anything found in Bath or Islington. I was staying in the Royal Temple Yacht club, which is a charming hotel that appears as if time stopped in the early 1960s. It stocks a good range of local ales and was decorated with oil paintings and small models of ships, which should be mandatory for coastal pubs.

The Yacht club very much represented the old world of Ramsgate. It’s thick carpet and polished brass handrails belong to a different age from the shabby chic of London’s Antic pubs. It is a place that is much alive, set next to a row of seafront restaurants and bars that hummed with activity in the late afternoon. As did the Queen Charlotte, a bohemian pub a few streets away that boasted a wide selection of beers from popular breweries.

Then to the Mega Spoons, a welcoming an airy pub, which is impressive given its size and dominance over the town. The sea front terrace is an excellent in the warm summer early evening. It’s a shame to think of this beautiful building standing empty and I’m glad that it has found a use worthy of its former royal status.

The Mega Spoons is the epitome of Spoons, and Spoons is the epitome of the modern pub experience. It is a social leveller, bringing together people from all aspects of Ramsgate life, boasts a wide selection of cask ale and craft beer and wholesome food. I ordered food and drink via their app and enjoyed libations late into the night. The only issue was that in an inebriated state I struggled to open the door to my room at the Yacht club.

The bus to Broadstairs

The next morning I took the bus to Broadstairs, further along the Kent coast. As the bus wound its way through the back streets of Thanet I noticed it was a different story to sunny seafront I had visited the night before. Only a few streets away from the Mega spoons and the poverty became apparent. The back streets of Thanet were reminiscent of Skerton or other poor places in the North of England. Not somewhere that was supposedly gentrifying due to people being displaced to Kent by London’s housing crisis. The wealth of London is not spreading through the South East.

This is mirrored in the pub situation across the country. Pubs in London are going from strength to strength. So many are opening that old shops, cinemas, working men’s clubs and even a former Job Centre are turning into pubs. Micro breweries are springing up everywhere.

Across the rest of the country pubs are closing at two a week and many rural communities are left without a pub. Wetherspoons continues to expand and the centre of Britain’s large cities still have many pubs, but the future for the estate pub outside of the wealthier suburbs looks bleak. The causes of this are myriad and reflect the current unequal economic state of the country.

In the back streets of Thanet my bus passed a pub called the Brown Jug (complete with a giant brown ceramic jug on the front porch), which was closed and boarded up. It looks like it was once a much loved local that had fallen on hard times. Tourists may be patronising the Mega Spoons or seafront pubs, but a few streets away pubs can’t stay open.

Fundamental division

This shows the fundamental divisions in British society. Thanet is an area split between wealthy former Londoners (or wealthy Londoners visiting the Mega Spoons) and suburbs of the “left behind”. Thanet is represented in the European Parliament by Nigel Farage and voted heavily for Brexit. I can’t help but feel that this division between the patrons of bohemian craft beer pubs and people whose locals are closing is part of the divide that was opened up in British society since the referendum.

The state of our pubs shows the emotional underpinning of the divisions in Britain. Some people see their lives getting worse, their communities declining and their pubs closing and want it to stop. Some people never leave their microbreweries and craft beer pubs and can’t see why anyone else thinks differently to them. Some people don’t understand shabby chic, exposed pipes, e-sports bars or board game cafes, and feel that the patrons of such places have contempt for the old fashioned boozer.

Even if the government paid for the Brown Jug to reopen I don’t think this would help the situation. We need solution that brings everyone into a prosperous future, whether they drink in sports bars, Spoons or Antic pubs. How we achieve this is a question too big to find the solution to in one weekend by the sea.

Calling Time on Alcohol Policy

It’s easy to be taken in by headlines. Not least when they’re about something that most of us enjoy: a few drinks. With headlines such as “Binge drinking costs NHS billions”, not to mention the Daily Mail’s propensity towards ‘hell in a hand-cart’ stories complete with photos of drunken young women sprawled on benches, you could be forgiven for thinking that Britain is in the midst of a binge drinking epidemic. Young people – those lager louts and alcopop-swigging girls – usually seem to take the lion’s share of the blame.

The statistics tell a different story, though. Overall alcohol consumption per capita in the UK peaked in 2004, and has declined since then – a trend that began noticeably earlier than the the current recession, when reduced consumer spending of all kinds could be expected. In real terms, alcohol is less expensive, mainly due to a shift in sales from pubs to supermarkets. And from 2003, we’ve also had 24 hour licensing laws, resulting in the demise of the mandatory 11pm call for last orders at the bar. So alcohol is less expensive and available for more of the day, yet we’re actually drinking less of it. It’s not even as if this trend masks a more specific problem of youth binge drinking. Alcohol consumption among men aged 16-24 has been declining sharply and consistently ever since 1998 (from 26 units per week then to 15 now). Some reports suggest that, despite perceptions, it’s the baby boomer generation who are more likely to overdo the booze.

Singling out and demonizing young people by the hand-wringing rightwing press is unfair and misleading. But this isn’t to say that there isn’t a problem with the drinking patterns of young people, or that these patterns can’t be changed for the better. What policies could foster a healthier drinking culture amongst young people? My argument is that, far from helping, stricter ID laws (such as ‘Think 25’) have the exact opposite of their intended effect, and exacerbate an unhealthy drinking culture. Instead, the government ought to ‘call time’ on this approach, and instead reduce the legal drinking age from 18 to 16.

When I was 16-17, it was relatively easy to get served in many pubs – illegally, of course. By the time my peers and I reached 18, we were familiar with pub culture, how to behave when drinking in a public place, and the risks (i.e. getting chucked out or worse) of not doing so. It’s become much more difficult since then. A friend of mine who worked for years behind a university bar claims that this change could be seen in the way freshers drank. They began turning up, aged 18, with very little experience of pubs or how to behave in them, whilst drinking just as much as previous students – much of it in their rooms instead of the bar. This is because making access to pubs more difficult doesn’t reduce under age drinking, it just drives it into homes – or parks and wasteland – with cheap supermarket spirits. Young people who are excluded from pubs may well never come back to them even when they are old enough, and instead develop a potentially more dangerous pattern of drinking exclusively at home. The current trend away from pub sales and towards supermarkets, not to mention runaway pub closures, appears to back this up.

Allowing 16 and 17 year olds to legally drink in pubs, in a supervised environment, would be a good way of teaching young people to drink responsibly. For this to work, it would have to be limited to pubs only – not supermarkets or off-licences. But this would be no bad thing; the supermarkets are already powerful and profitable enough as it is, whereas pubs – many of them struggling small businesses – could use the extra income. Ideally, it would exclude sales of unmixed spirits and shots, although I accept that this aspect may be difficult to enforce. It should also exclude clubs, where antisocial behaviour or excessive consumption may go unobserved more easily.

It’s a given that there’d be a lot of opposition to such a policy. The big supermarkets and off licence chains would hate it for a start, and they’re a powerful lobbying voice. Some would claim that it would merely increase alcohol use in a society that already drinks too much. Others may argue that, whatever the benefits, pubs are an adult environment and should remain so. But how can we expect 16 and 17 year olds to act responsibly if society treats them like children? How can it be right that you can legally have sex, join the army or even get married at 16, but can’t buy a drink at your own wedding reception?

In a society that always seems to believe the worst about young people, the temptation is to turn the screws ever tighter, make alcohol ever more difficult to legally obtain. This is the prevailing attitude in a society seemingly run by and for the now ageing and suspicious baby boomers. But like all prohibitionists, those who support this deny the reality of consumption. Much like cannabis, or the sex trade, consumption already exists. In the same way that the ‘war on drugs’ hasn’t reduced drug taking, stricter drinking laws haven’t stopped young people obtaining and using alcohol. It just relegates it from the controlled environment of the pub to the unregulated and dangerous sphere of the alley or park. If we accept that drinking alcohol is a part of our culture, it’s nonsensical to deny young people a setting in which to learn to do it responsibly. It’s not about whether we should ‘encourage’ consumption or attempt to curtail it. It’s about being pragmatic, realistic, and for want of a better word – adult – when it comes to booze.

 "The Shepherd and Dog Pub" by lloydi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0