My first London address was a two-bed on the 13th-floor of Lillingston House, a white and grey tower on a social housing scheme tucked into the footfall of Arsenal’s ground. I’d moved from my native Manchester. You could see the Post Office tower from the living-room window, a glaring daily reminder of no longer waking up in the regions. Close proximity to the noise of football reminded me of home. I loved that duality.
A short walk onto Holloway Road there was more. Shopping with the monied middle classes of Waitrose, drinking with the proletariat at Wetherspoons afterwards. The neighbourhood character was coloured in best by flitting between both. A touch of class, a lot of bonhomie. That liquid juxtaposition lubricated the passage of my psychological shift, North to South very nicely, cheers.
This week, Savills Estate Agents listed 32 J.D. Wetherspoons for sale, nine in London. My first thought was to look down the list to see if the old Holloway Road haunt had escaped the cull. It had, but for how long? A spokesman for the hospitality giant, a FTSE 250 constituent which has as much right to stake its claim on the social shape of London as The Ivy group, explained that repair and staff costs rendered their no-nonsense drinking culture financially perilous. Our national mindset is so attuned to crisis mode, we no longer need to hear the reasons. We know them all. Nobody ordinary can afford anything much that’s fun anymore. Libraries, fish and chip shops, now the remaining pubs that haven’t been butchered into flashy rentals. This is the Britain we live in.
Wetherspoons was never the prettiest place to drink, yet its bait of keeping prices low and patrons high was always irresistible, regardless of taste. They took spectacular old buildings and handed them over to the people. A basic concept caught a broad social spectrum in its net.
Wetherspoons is where you drink when you need to pay cash. It’s where you take family members who don’t think London is really for them. Not unrelatedly, it’s the only place Northerners don’t comment on the price of a pint. It’s where you nip for a sharpener before weddings, wakes, job interviews. Nothing reflects the acrid taste in the immediate aftermath of heartbreak like an afternoon spent among the hardcore daytime drinkers of Wetherspoons. Likewise, nowhere understands the philosophy of ‘just one more’ as a bell rings closing time more implicitly.
This is where posh London kids who’ve just discovered Drill go to scope out the parameters of their privilege. Gin-soaked nanas feel right at home here, too. Wetherspoons is an opera house, old government building or bingo hall, all repurposed as somewhere that will categorically never embrace orange wine. At least, not on purpose. The whole point of getting drunk is that after the third pint you neither remember nor care where you are, only the company that you keep, people who abruptly appear to be the most amazing on the planet.
When the bottom tier is removed from London’s social life, the measure against which the top tier fans itself so proudly is removed, too. Everyone loses. Not everything has to be luxury. The lure of the city falls apart in one dimension. If London doesn’t contain multitudes, it contains nothing at all.
In other news...
Dahmer: Monster — The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is pretty repulsive viewing. It’s also incredibly popular, the most viewed new drama in Netflix’s history. Critics hate it. Audiences can’t get enough.
The unforeseen appetite for gay serial killer TV (Dennis Nilsen, Stephen Port, now Dahmer) has peaked. It’s not all down to the evil TV genius of showrunner Ryan Murphy. Evan Peter gives a bone-chilling performance as introvert psychopath Dahmer. In a casting beyond irony, The Waltons’ mum, Michael Learned, is brilliant as his grandma. Old queer cinema auteur Gregg Araki and Jennifer Lynch, both direct. But this is Murphy’s gig, a master of the darkest TV arts. On Monica Lewinsky, Aids, Gianni Versace, Voguing, Bette Davis and plastic surgery, Murphy dishes his stories up hard, fast and effectively. He’s the Aaron Spelling of now — Dahmer is the gratuitous must-watch of the autumn.
