george orwell pub essay

George Orwell at the Pub

The man who, among many other achievements, inspired two television programmes, Big Brother and Room 101 , and painted a chilling dystopian portrayal of a totalitarian state in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , also unofficially provided the blueprint for many of the pubs in modern Britain.

George Orwell was an influential essayist as well as a novelist (indeed, the Orwell Prize is an annual award, set up in his honour, for the best piece of non-fiction published each year), but one of his less famous essays was ‘ The Moon under Water ’, a short piece published in the London Evening Standard in February 1946.

In ‘The Moon under Water’, Orwell describes his ideal pub: it is known for its ‘atmosphere’ as much as the quality of its beer, and the barmaids know most of the customers by name. You can’t get a meal there, but there are plenty of bar snacks: liver-sausage sandwiches, mussels, and cheese. In terms of decor, the pub has ornamental mirrors behind the bar and a ‘stuffed bull’s-head over the mantelpiece’. Indeed, ‘everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.’

Perhaps most importantly of all, they ‘never … make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handleless glass.’ One wonders what Orwell would make of most modern British pubs, where the norm has become straight, handleless glasses rather than the tankard glasses which were an English icon for much of the twentieth century.

Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in India in 1903, and formed his more famous pen name by joining the patron saint of England (and the monarch of the time, George V) with the river Orwell in Suffolk. The idea was to create a typically English-sounding name.

Orwell introduced a number of words and phrases into the language, including Big Brother (for constant surveillance by the state), thoughtcrime, thought police, and doublethink (but not, as is sometimes claimed, double-talk – an earlier, American coinage). His second most-famous book, Animal Farm , almost never made it to print: the manuscript only narrowly avoided destruction at the hands of the Nazis when London was bombed in the early 1940s, and then a number of leading publishers – including T. S. Eliot, editorial director at Faber and Faber, who had been working alongside Orwell at the BBC during the war – refused to touch it.

Fourteen Wetherspoon pubs around the UK bear the name The Moon under Water in honour of Orwell’s essay: there are branches in London, Manchester, Wolverhampton, Watford, and Milton Keynes, among many others.

The founder of the chain, Tim Martin, formed the name of the chain JD Wetherspoon by combining the name of a character from the television series The Dukes of Hazzard with Mr Wetherspoon, one of Martin’s old schoolteachers who allegedly wrote in his school report that he would ‘amount to nothing’.

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Review of The Pub and the People by Mass-Observation

It is a pity that this large and careful survey could not have had a short appendix indicating what effect the war has had on our drinking habits. It seems to have been compiled just before the war, and even in that short period of time beer has doubled in price and been heavily diluted.

Writing at a time when ‘mild’ was still fivepence a pint (between 1936 and 1941 rearmament only raised it by a penny), the Mass-Observers found that in ‘Worktown’ the regular pub-goer was putting away, on average, between fifteen and twenty pints a week. This sounds a good deal, but it is unquestionable that in the past seventy years the annual consumption of beer per head has decreased by nearly two-thirds, and it is the Mass-Observers’ conclusion that ‘the pub as a cultural institution is at present declining’. This happens not merely because of persecution by Nonconformist Town Councils, nor even primarily because of the increased price of drink, but because the whole trend of the age is away from creative communal amusements and towards solitary mechanical ones. The pub, with its elaborate social ritual, its animated conversations and – at any rate in the North of England – its songs and week-end comedians, is gradually replaced by the passive, drug-like pleasures of the cinema and the radio. This is only a cause for rejoicing if one believes, as a few Temperance fanatics still do, that people go to pubs to get drunk. The Mass-Observers, however, have no difficulty in showing that there was extraordinarily little drunkenness in the period they were studying: for every five thousand hours that the average pub stays open, only one of its clients is drunk and disorderly.

And one woman answered the questionnaire thus:

My reason is, because I always liked to see my grandmother having a drink of beer at night. She did seem to enjoy it, and she could pick up a dry crust of bread and cheese, and it seemed like a feast. She said if you have a drink of beer you will live to be one hundred, she died at ninety-two. I shall never refuse a drink of beer. There is no bad ale, so Grandma said.

This little piece of prose, which impresses itself upon the memory like a poem, would in itself be a sufficient justification of beer, if indeed it needed justifying.

The Listener , 21 January 1943. Orwell was paid a fee of £2.2s for this review.

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London, 1946: bombed buildings, bad food and black market spivs. While recent World War victory and Attlee’s new Welfare State gave people cause for optimism, the daily realities were harsher. For many in Britain’s ravaged capital, the most accessible respite from the hungry grind of ordinary life was the common public house. A pub was a place where one could become cloudy from drink, warmed by a coal fire and cheerful with amicable company. Such was its importance in an Englishman’s existence that George Orwell wrote an influential article in the Evening Standard outlining his vision of the perfect pub. The Moon Under Water , which would also be the name of this imagined establishment, outlined ten ideals that Orwell desperately wanted to find together under one roof, preferably in London. These elements, such as the use of china drinking vessels and a limiting of darts to the public bar, would combine to form Orwell’s alcoholic Shangri la.

At the heart of his musings, it was community that Orwell craved. So, The Moon Under Water would be frequented by locals (who occupied the same chairs) rather than random ‘drunks and rowdies’. The barmaids (some of whom may have hair dyed in ‘surprising shades’) would take a personal interest in all their customers, and whole families would gather and unwind in the expansive garden. The consumption of alcohol was really secondary to the human aspect: a social lubricant to foster civility and community. In Orwell’s words, ‘atmosphere’ was The Moon Under Water ’s real allure. It was this element, not specifics like ‘creamy draught stout’ or ‘grained woodwork’, which the writer wisely saw as definitive of the British pub. He did not want ‘boozing-shops’ – he wanted a venue for the beating heart of each local area.

Fast forward nearly seven decades to London, 2015 and the situation is rather different. Some of Orwell’s ten publican commandments seem amusingly outdated and faintly ridiculous. The need for a working phone is completely redundant, for example handleless glasses, of which he was not a fan, have been universally accepted by heavy-drinking Brits as ideal for knocking back pints. (The retro desire for handled glasses seem an affected nostalgia.) On the other hand, a number of Orwell’s wishes have now been comprehensively achieved. Meals served in today’s pubs, from dubious Thai curries to gourmet burgers, would be unimaginable to a post-war Englishman who considered ‘boiled jam pudding’ to be culinary heaven. Beer gardens and draught stout are no longer imagined luxuries but as common a sight as fruit machines and Australian wine. In these ways, examining The Moon Under Water shows how times have changed.

However, there is a far more profound difference between pub culture in 2015 and pub culture in 1946. Dramatically, traditional pubs are disappear- ing at an accelerating rate. Each week, more Red Lions or Railway Arms are quietly boarded up, the regulars having to re-locate for their social meetings – or simply dying off. According to the British Beer and Pub Association, twenty-nine establishments close their doors permanently a week: there are roughly 20,000 fewer than there were three decades ago. In place of these pubs are springing up a record number of trendy bars and cafés diminishing the pub’s cultural significance with every passing month. Bare-bricked hipster joints with retro jukebox playlists and faux-Americana aesthetics sell guacamole as enthusiastically as ale. The Viking-bearded ‘mixologists’ tempt today’s thirsty Orwells away from old-fashioned locals in huge numbers. Neither are pubs the first choice for a night out any more, with clubs and late night venues offering liver-busting drinks deals. With rocketing prices no doubt partly to blame, pub-going is used for lower key social meetings, like the Anglo-Saxon version of continental café culture. It seems that the famous British pub is slipping into the footnotes of history.

Modern commentators lazily decry the decline of the pub in national drinking culture as simply awful, nostalgically shaking their heads at the crumbling of Orwell’s vision. Disciples of Orwell’s writing portray the New York-style bars of the twenty-first century as charmless dens of binge drinking. All vestiges of respectable, old-fashioned beverage consumption can seem a dim memory when viewing some trashed club reveller vomiting over the kerb. Gone are the days when women had the choice to occupy a separate room from male drinkers. Articles on the subject see only doom and gloom, apologising to the late Orwell for the perceived polarisation between old pubs and new bars. But this is a pessimistic simplification of reality.

We must first ask ourselves: what exactly is a traditional British pub? If faced with this question, many would paint a highly specific picture, one of a well-defined archetype stemming from nineteenth-century urban Britain: the angular, brick exterior; a narrow doorway leading to a dark interior; wooden tables, Victorian architecture and imposing furniture. In reality, this was just one style amongst the multitude of inns, taverns and alehouses that evolved over two thousand years on this windswept island. The Romans, as part of their thankless quest to civilise our muddy barbarians’s paradise, established a series of public venues for the consumption of wine and ale. The Anglo-Saxons continued the idea, their drinking dens becoming forums for local meetings. The public house made its way through the Middle Ages and the Early Modern era to enter industrial Britain in the form of the urban pub. So why should this evolution not continue? Why stop in a nineteenth-century purgatory? The single public house style, then, has come to represent all British drinking venues, rather than being seen as one type. This is a misleading mistake that derails any debate with rose-tinted nostalgia – modern bars are as legitimate as an inn or tavern.

Furthermore, let us consider what most pubs are really like, rather than relying on some easy stereotype. Many locals are disgusting hovels with wobbly tables and an undertone of hostility. We’ve all been to those dodgy pubs where the room falls silent on entry – where half a dozen die-hards stare silently at their dusty glasses, alone with their demons and thoughts of better days. Before the smoking ban, these places would be thick with a dense fog of fumes.

Besides, who says change is bad? In reality, many new bars are not cesspits of binge drinking but are actually more respectable than the pubs that they are replacing. This implies a healthy evolution of British drinking houses, with new styles making a necessary replacement of the old. Sticky surfaces, warm beer and dirty toilets are being swapped for clean floors, displays of bourbon and artisanal snacks. I like being able to eat pulled pork and drink mysterious international spirits. Vintage posters of Humphrey Bogart and luminous Coors signs look nicer than peeling wallpaper and grubby carpets. Orwell himself described nineteenth-century architecture as ugly. If new venues can offer what decrepit, intimidating pubs once did, but with a basic level of hygiene, then such complaints are short-sighted: they are just another example of how simplified ideas are distorting reality.

It is useful to use Orwell’s analysis to see how modern bars can fulfil his desires for the perfect pub. As he correctly identified, the key to a true British drinking establishment is not decor or Victorian styling, but a communal atmosphere: regular patrons; jovial staff; and somewhere for friends and relations to gather and unwind. It gives an area its soul and brings communities together. At the same time, a drinking venue should offer calm sanctuary to those who want to escape the trials of life. In the warm safety of a public house, one can gather oneself, pint in hand, without judgement. It is a place which welcomes inebriation, relaxation and conversation not normally allowed in public. What stops a modern bar from offering these things? What Orwell desired can be found in a variety of building types, whether Victorian or twenty-first century. New bars that incorporate traditional elements will meet the needs of pub-goers perfectly: places to sit and relax; a rapport with the regulars; a social environment. It is these venues which are filling the void left by former pubs. And, in the hyper-connected world of today, communities are based far less on proximity but are instead fostered through online links. So, meeting places do not need to be exclusively in the local area. It seems that we get too caught up in the image of a venue rather than focus on what it is actually providing. A friendly bar is thus not too different from what Orwell imagined when he wrote The Moon Under Water .

Such is the public desire for an updated drinking culture that pubs, which are surviving, are the ones that are moving with the times. They thrive precisely because their owners are refusing to sit and fester in a grubby, stale past. They retain the traditional elements that we are fond of, but are adopting aspects not found in their nineteenth-century and twentieth-century predecessors. These modernised establishments share forward-thinking practices with many of the newer bars: approachable staff; pleasant interiors; a wider variety of drinks. The last point is particularly pertinent as drinking habits change: the dominance of beer is being challenged. Indeed, the J D Wetherspoon chain now sells around fifty millions cups of coffee annually. Ironically, the growing wine culture in our country takes the pub back to its original Roman roots. And neither is the appearance of food an entirely modern concept. Inns and country pubs have been feeding hungry travellers for centuries.

It cannot be denied that the decline of the common pub demonstrates a general loosening of local ties in British society. However if a new kind of watering hole offers a friendly, collective place to drink and socialise then why scorn its presence? In fact, such a place would be far more in the national tradition than those anonymous, mock-Victorian pubs in central London which are packed with tourists and a have different set of bar staff each month. Orwell described what the drinking establishments of our capital could become in 1984 thus: ‘From their grimy swing doors … there came forth a smell of urine, sawdust and sour beer.’ If it is these kinds of pubs that we are keeping from our streets, then we should not despair.

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In an article written for the London Evening Standard in 1946, he produced a detailed description of his ideal watering-hole, The Moon Under Water, which "is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights".

One pub chain that literally pins Orwell's advice to its walls is JD Wetherspoons. Fourteen of its establishments are called The Moon Under Water, named after a journalist in 1986 suggested a similarity between the Orwell's ideal drinking establishment and a Wetherspoons pub.

Orwell's essay picks out the essence of what a pub is about, says founder Tim Martin, and is "very similar" to what the chain is trying to create, although he admits that the writer might not have been impressed by some examples.

"He'd probably say we do very well in getting near to his idealised pub in some and we've got some more work to do in others," Martin adds.

In the heart of Cambridge stands The Cambridge Blue, current holder of the local Campaign for Real Ale's award for branch and county pub of the year.

Its landlord, Jethro Scotcher-Littlechild, believes he has found the ideal formula. "The quality of the ale's got to be right, I think good food and we like people to be talking in the bar. We don't have any music," he says

"The art of conversation's what you need in a good British pub."

Orwell would have concurred with the ban on music. "In the Moon Under Water it is always quiet enough to talk," he wrote. "The house possesses neither a radio nor a piano, and even on Christmas Eve and such occasions the singing that happens is of a decorous kind."

But, in one respect at least, his outlook was remarkably modern, decrying "the puritanical nonsense of excluding children - and therefore, to some extent, women - from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing-shops instead of the family gathering-places that they ought to be".

Spit and sawdust

Paul Moody, who with Robin Turner co-authored The Search for the Perfect Pub: Looking for the Moon Under Water, says sometimes, the perfect pub is just one that's open.

But he also believes that the quality of a pub is "all about individuality, character and independence".

"The trouble is these days so many pubs you go into, you go into them and you come away feeling as though it's nothing more than a chain-store effectively.

"It provides a service but you don't get the individuality, which is what Orwell was talking about, really... the atmosphere is key to a great pub."

And despite the loss of hundreds of licensed premises every year, passions can run high among some customers when their local is faced with last orders.

Take Cardiff's Vulcan Hotel. Built in 1853, 29 years before the city's renowned Brains Brewery, it is one of the Welsh capital's oldest pubs. When it faced closure in 2008, more than 5,000 people rallied round and signed a petition to save it.

Rachel Thomas, a Save The Vulcan campaigner from Cardiff, is clear about the pub's charm.

"It's one of the last spit and sawdust pubs in Cardiff. It still has a lot of its original features such as the old tiling - it's had a lick of paint over the years but the inside has largely been left alone. It has a real Victorian feel to it.

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"There's a real mix of people that go there; you have the old locals drinking alongside students because the pub is opposite the university. And a lot of young professionals have started drinking there having heard about it through the local campaign to save it.

"They also hold music and poetry nights so it's very much a community pub."

Orwell's biographer DJ Taylor says Orwell was writing "at a time when pub culture was changing drastically," adding that The Moon Under Water did not actually exist. "It was entirely phantasmal, made up of various different component parts."

As a mirror image of his ideal hostelry, Orwell's 1984 contains his own vision of public house hell, when an old prole complains about the new beer measures brought in under the new regime.

"'E could 'drawed me off a pint," grumbled the old man as he settled down behind a glass. "A 'alf litre ain't enough. It don't satisfy. And a 'ole litre's too much. It starts my bladder running. Let alone the price."

What makes the perfect pub? Join the debate on Twitter using the #perfectpub hashtag, or leave a comment on Facebook.

#perfectpub needs a real fire, allows muddy walking boots & serves ginger beer, hot toddies & mulled wine in winter. Lizzy Simpson (@Lizzy24a) via Twitter

Good food, good real ale, good company and a blues band. Matthew White via Facebook

My five best mates, a dartboard (and darts), warm ale, a cheeky barmaid, cheap pork scratching #perfectpub Stewart Darkin (@stewartdarkin) via Twitter

The Orwell model of the #perfectpub doesn't add up for me. The modern pub serves multiple needs; food, booze, sport TV, quiz, company... Michael B. O'Neill (@MichaelsStuff) via Twitter

Music - quiet or none, Drinks - Real Ale, Fire - Open and roaring (seasonal), Food - "home made style" #perfectpub David Allen (@davidallen83) via Twitter

All of the above, a fire, a dog, leather seats and pickled eggs in a jar behind the bar. Jane Turner via Facebook

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The Moon Under Water

George orwell.

8 pages, Paperback

First published February 9, 1946

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The Moon Under Water: Orwell’s Reimagining of the Pub June 2016

Alongside The Queen Vic and the Rover’s Return, George Orwell’s The Moon Under Water is perhaps the most famous fictional public house in Britain. In 1946, the Evening Standard published the short essay in which he painted his picture of a perfect London pub . With ten key qualities , he brought together many familiar and established pub characteristics and added a few of his own invention. What could have been first mistaken as a glowing review of somewhere he had been and enjoyed, actually only ever existed in his imagination. Reading over Orwell’s vision of the pub 70 years later, how relevant is it today in the context of declining pub numbers and use?

“GREAT FOOD, WELL KEPT ALE”

Whilst it did not serve dinner, ‘The Moon’ had a ‘good solid lunch’ available upstairs and a well-stocked snack counter (though the ‘liver-sausage sandwiches’ and ‘boiled jam rolls’ are off most menus these days). Over the last 25 years, many pubs have reinvented themselves as ‘gastropubs’, offering a wider food selection and elevating ‘pub grub’ into well-cooked British fayre. The overall quality of the food on offer is, without doubt, continuing to rise across the country’s pubs. Tasty and affordable food is key to many pubs’ reinvention today, and most tend to serve dinner too.

Stout, in Orwell’s time was hard to come by, but it was on tap in his favourite pub, and of the darkest and creamiest variety, just as he liked it. Drinks are served in their correct and intended pots, and the establishment is very ‘particular’ about this. Today, new and exciting drinks are constantly on rotation as Britain enjoys a resurgence of ale with the rise of local craft breweries. With it, the classic dimpled glass ‘handle’ has also seen a return, the drinking vessel traditionally associated with bitter and ale.

WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME

The pub provides the venue for an ‘elaborate social ritual’, as Orwell described in another article he wrote for the Standard . At a time before television, mobiles and social media, the pub of the 1940s offered entertainment, escapism and companionship. Cinema and radio were the ‘passive drug-like pleasures’ opposed to the ‘creative’ and ‘communal’ forms of recreation found in social interactions over a pint of beer. Free of the ‘solitary mechanical amusements’ of the radio, The Moon is a pub geared towards good conversation. Always quiet enough to talk, it offers a unique ‘atmosphere’ generated by the interactions of people from different walks of life who might not otherwise meet.

The bar staff (exclusively middle-aged and female in Orwell’s time) know the regulars by name and where their favourite seats are. The somewhat motherly barmaid ‘takes an interest‘ keeping an eye on the community. The clientele is mostly made of regulars making The Moon a ‘community pub’. As opposed to serving a passing trade of tourists, visitors or workers, ‘locals’ mainly serve people who live or reside nearby.

Today, ‘locals’ account for around 57% of the pubs in the country, according to ‘Pubs and Places’, a report produced in 2012 by the Institute for Public Policy Research. As the report aptly describes, pubs are places where ‘a community can bounce off itself’. 69% of all adults believe that a well-run community pub is as important to community life as a post office, a local store or a community centre.

REINVENTION REQUIRED

With current economic and social pressures challenging pubs of today, creative solutions are now being sought to retain them at the centre of their communities. As with Orwell’s literary creation, the formula of success is often to retain the best elements of a pub, introducing new functions to help them improve, reinvent and prosper. Now 70 years old, some elements of The Moon Under Water that might seem outdated or antiquated but plenty that we still identify with and cherish.