In a move that comes as no surprise whatsoever, my local boozer in east London has banned children. I say it’s deeply unsurprising because the last time I went in there with my child about a year ago — I was forced in by a rainstorm, it was the middle of the day — it was made abundantly clear that this was not a child-friendly establishment (no, not even for one as plainly adorable and impeccably behaved as my own — ha ha).
It was intimated that we were basically risking her life just by being there: we needed to watch her at all times, we were told. The staff couldn’t be responsible for what might happen — if someone poured a drink on her, for instance, because accidents had happened in the past, well, that would be on us.
We took it under advisement. We don’t generally let her toddle off in a pub, but it’s entirely possible that she was climbing on the chair beside me, or hovering somewhere nearby but not directly in my grasp — and they felt it necessary to alert me to the fact. The first time, it seemed like plain good advice — the landlord had strict rules, parents should watch their children closely, fair enough. The second time was strange. By the time the “someone might pour a drink over your child” scenario was floated, we got the gist: we should leave, and take our filthy offspring with us.
This was consigned to the annals of bewildering London encounters — along with the time a woman hit me with a metal crutch on Camden Road — just one of those deranging little peccadilloes you have to accept when you choose to live here. Big on culture, big on vibes but also a city that will spit in your eye and charge you £7 for the privilege.
It was a pub that wanted you to know, in real time, that you and your child were a problem
All of which is to say that I find the landlord’s comments that his establishment was being used as a crèche sort of laughable. Short of being doused in petrol as we lumbered our buggy into an unobtrusive corner, I can’t imagine a less accommodating welcome. This particular pub was not, in my experience, a pub that was tolerating families while privately wishing they’d leave. It was a pub that wanted you to know, in real time, that you and your child were a problem — or at the very least, a problem waiting to happen.
But banning children, it turns out, wasn’t enough. Having made his position perfectly clear to anyone who’d tried to bring a small person in for a quiet half, the landlord apparently felt the need to take the argument further — to Metro, Sky News, to Instagram, to anyone who’d listen — to explain that the real issue wasn’t the ban itself, but the entitled, feckless, supervision-averse parents who had made it necessary. Parents are, it seems, a people who have mistaken a Hackney pub for a crèche, who lack the basic understanding that children require watching in public spaces, and who have — through our collective negligence — stressed out the dogs.
One of the truly joyous and spectacular things about living in a free country is that curmudgeonly business owners are allowed to be curmudgeonly in their own establishments. If you don’t want punters to bring their kids into your pub, that’s absolutely your legal right. But does that decision have to be followed-up by a media blitzkrieg in which you burn every bridge with any parent in your community by calling them entitled idiots? I’m not so sure. Whatever — we left our drinks on a table, loaded her into her buggy and sprinted the rest of the way home in the rain.
I’m concerned that hostility towards parents and children is becoming normalised
The conversation that the landlord’s proclamations has generated has been predictably withering. I’m not here to defend annoying people — parents or otherwise — I’m just concerned that hostility towards parents and children is becoming normalised to the point where people expect children to exist as silent apparitions, ghostly waifs who make no noise or mess, who float about making no demands on the world — and then, somehow, materialise at 18 as fully formed, socially competent adults who know how to behave in a pub.
Setting aside the fact that mothers in particular navigate a whole battery of dangers and disadvantages in the name of birthing and raising the nation’s offspring — physical, emotional, financial — I’ve always felt that a great pub is defined by its atmosphere, and that atmosphere is only enriched by a healthy mix of people.
Worn-out parents, chattering toddlers, a baby asleep in the corner — they are as much a part of a community as anyone else. It’s not a crèche, it’s just a local. And I’d go one further: parents who lay down roots are the lifeblood of London communities. The ones who scrimp and save, take on terrifying amounts of debt, sacrifice almost everything just to buy a one-and-a-half bed leasehold flat with no outdoor space where they can raise their family — only to be told, by the pub at the end of their road, that they’re entitled and not particularly welcome. There is something almost comedically dispiriting about that. London needs families. It needs them to stay, to invest, to build something here. It needs their children, who will one day be Londoners themselves, paying their own eye-watering rents and nursing their own overpriced pints.
