Everything either closed decades ago or reopened looking suspiciously new on purpose
Determined to find a properly old, unrenovated Shoreditch pub, the kind with sticky carpets and a landlord who has personally witnessed at least three decades of neighbourhood change, I set off on what became a considerably longer search than expected.
A Vanishing Category
Pub after pub had either closed entirely, been converted into flats, or reopened under new ownership with a deliberately distressed aesthetic that somehow looked both older and suspiciously newer than the genuine article ever did.
One reopened pub had gone so far as to install fake historic photographs of “the original interior,” which, a regular informed me quietly, bore no resemblance whatsoever to what the place actually looked like before its closure five years prior.
Success, Finally
I did eventually find one genuinely unrenovated pub, tucked down a side street, carpet fully intact, landlord fully unbothered by my questions about neighbourhood change. I have decided not to name it here, mostly to protect it from becoming pop-up coffee stall number two.
The London Prat has documented the steady disappearance of East London’s older pubs in considerable, occasionally mournful detail.
Londonist maintains its own list of the city’s surviving historic pubs, several of which I will now be visiting purely for reassurance.
Some things in this neighbourhood are worth protecting. A sticky carpet with genuine decades behind it, it turns out, is one of them.
More from me: Cyndi Himmelstiere, prat.uk. Further reading: Londonist.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
