Back in the 1980s, one of those firms that doesn’t actually do anything but owns all sorts of things bought the rights to use the name of that old stalwart of Scottish brewing, Belhaven. It bought up lots of bottom of the range Truman’s pubs across London and put ‘Belhaven’ on the front. They had one distinctive feature. It was a single, vertical, brass coloured pipe on the bar that fed six taps on a cross pipe. One Guinness; one keg bitter; one keg cider; three keg lagers. Not the sort of place London Drinker readers would go to. The nearest to me had its fifteen minutes of fame when, in 1993, someone was shot dead in the bar and the Belhaven estate rather fell away about then.
This was the Royal on Victoria Park and, like the others around the park, it wasn’t built by Truman’s but by the Crown Estate. Consequently, it didn’t have the Truman’s look, like the Hare in Mare Street or the Royal Oak in Columbia Road Market. The same goes for the Crown, on the south side of the park. The Royal is now a Remarkable pub and the Crown is now a Young’s pub.
In decades long gone, Young’s were a refuge from Watney’s pubs with their red stripe, Courage pubs with their blue stripe, Whitbread pubs with their brown stripe or Charrington pubs with their Toby Jug. But, alas, the curse of the corporate style manual has struck. The Times reported on 9 January that Young’s have run into opposition to their policy of replacing their pub signs with a uniform design that just has the initial letter of the pub on a plain background. The result is that the Crown and the nearby Coburn Arms have pretty much the same sign. What the Times doesn’t mention is that the internal décor of Young’s pubs has also undergone the same process of homogenisation. The Crown and the Coburn are blighted by funereal colours, oppressively over ornate ceilings, hideous light fittings and an obsession with high tables and inaccessible high stools and benches. At least the Lamb, in Bloomsbury, which it uses to illustrate its coverage, has a listed interior and so should be safe from this vandalism.
There is always a temptation for owners to crush any individuality in their pubs and to impose a house style. They steamroller flat anything that is distinctive so that people know what to expect. And this isn’t just the big, faceless owners either. An Antic pub is always distressed furniture and exposed brickwork. But the mess Young’s have made of their signs policy is one little symptom of a wider problem that requires us to dig in and press on for continued distinction for each and every pub.
And then there’s the matter of Young’s weird Geronimo food but that’s for another day.
Nik Wood