. Every little table had its plate-sized ashtray. A potman came round emptying it, banging the thing on the edge of a bucket. He cleaned away the remnants with a two-inch paintbrush. The Archetypal Arms had bowl-glasses (for bottled Mackeson milk stout or a Babycham) upside-down in wooden docking bays above the bar. These caught smoke curling into them from below, layer upon layer. But when smoking was banned in 2007, the true smell of the pub came out: drains, sweat and drink-soiled carpets. The Archetypal Arms was seldom crowded. Even in Soho, the Helvetia or the Swiss pub in Compton S){kind=link}
From the stink of cigarettes to the tang of pickled eggs, the glory days of the British boozer now feel like a distant memory
In 1943, George Orwell described the ideal London pub, which he called the Moon Under Water. It had a good fire burning, beer in pleasant strawberry-pink china mugs and “a solid lunch – for example, a cut off the joint, two vegetables and boiled jam roll – for about three shillings”.
Pink china mugs? A cut off the joint? You’d have been lucky. The black and white photographs in a new book, The London Pub, show what pubs were really like and yet why, for all their deficiencies, we still spent such a long time in them. Then suddenly they changed, and anybody who is now under 45 hardly knew them.
Pictures, though, don’t convey the most memorable thing about the real, not the ideal pub – let us call it the Archetypal Arms – and that is the smell.
One whiff of Senior Service takes you there physically. I never got the hang of smoking, but I didn’t need to. Having taken to drink like a duck to Burton Best Bitter, I did my smoking passively. Early evening sunbeams lit up billows at the deep end of the Archetypal Arms.