All bar none: there’s more to the pub than just drink

Life’s great joys are usually its little ones, and one of the greatest is ordering at the bar in a pub. The custom — as opposed to sitting at a table and being served by a waiter — was one of the things I missed most during lockdown. The period when pubs reopened but could only provide table service was miserable.

A bar is more than just the place where drinks are dispensed. It’s a pub’s heart, the region where its name (short, of course, for ‘public house’) gets its meaning. You never know who you’re going to meet there. This is why pubs are always more exciting than members’ clubs.

It is also why London became the financial capital of Europe. Peter Rees, ex-chief planning officer of the Square Mile, says that the fact that you stand up to drink in an English pub ‘means you can be closer to people you don’t know than if you’re sitting at a table. The gossip you get in a French café is the gossip of your groups. The gossip you get in a London pub is the gossip of other people’s groups, if you’re careful and clever. That’s very valuable, because you can take it back to the office and put two and two together and make some money.’

This element of bringing disparate people together is illustrated in the countless TV shows that have used the bar as a plot device. From Bet Lynch and her drinkers in the Rovers Return, to Barbara Windsor serving Boris Johnson in the Queen Vic, no soap opera has ever succeeded without its pub. In The Sweeney, John Thaw seemed to take most of his phone calls in one London boozer or another, the landlord placing the phone on the bar so Regan could pick up the receiver.