Danny Randell: In search of the public houses

Canada sorely lacks 'third places' where friends and family can gather, and a few more proper pubs will fix that.

(Dolly's Tavern, St. James Street, Montreal - by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1845.)

In the early 20th century, the travel writer H.V. Morton penned a series of articles for the Daily Express chronicling his experiences as a tourist in his own country, later adapted into the bestseller In Search of England. The book is a delight to read and has been described as ‘travel writing at its best’. It is replete with amusing anecdotes and scenes of a bucolic and romantic nature, recording life in a country still unmarked by the Second World War or the technological revolution that would come after it.

England today looks very different from how it did in 1927, yet there are still glimpses of the world Morton captured for his readers, if you know where to look. One of those is the historic village pub.

I’m not talking about the Michelin-starred restaurant hidden under a thatched roof, or the pub-cum-sports bar where men gather for a freezing pint of Foster’s to watch football at the weekend, lovely as both of those things may be. I mean the unassuming, low-ceilinged, lath-and-plaster pub with a pedigree, where bitter is still pumped up from the basement and the only sound to be heard is that of patrons, and usually the publican, in conversation. England still has a few of these. Canada, where I live, has almost none.

I was fortunate enough, however, to find one of these rare birds, a veritable pub in the British tradition here in the Great White North. Panelled from floor to ceiling and beautifully decorated, it is housed in a tall stone building that evokes a distinctive old-world charm. When I first walked in, more than a decade ago now, it was easy to notice that the bar staff were smartly attired, pints were poured with care and, remarkably, there wasn’t a single television screen in sight. Apart from a log fire and Timothy Taylor’s draught ale, it wasn’t missing much.

Here was a place to sit, to sip, to share smiles, meals and laughs. A meeting place for mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, siblings, lovers and bosom friends. Here was a pub that could genuinely claim to be ‘local’, despite being situated nowhere near most of its patrons’ residences.

There are good reasons Canada doesn’t have a pub culture in the way Britain does. For one, pubs simply aren’t a part of our built environment. In place of pubs, there are franchise ‘lounges’ and hotel bars. A place to eat, sure, and to drink, definitely, but as destinations in which to socialise, they are uncompelling. Most of these watering holes are new additions to suburban neighbourhoods, not, as in Britain, centuries-old institutions.

Yet the pub I mentioned above is a testament to what intentionality around a space can achieve. It requires vision as well as commitment, for choosing a higher form of existence over an economically expedient one is not an easy path. As a testament to the difficulty, after decades of determined resistance, my favourite pub has just mounted televisions on its walls.

In the 21st century, a vicious culture of entertainment saturates the very air and, after years of turning away prospective customers ignorant of the telos of the establishment into which they’d wandered, my pub quite reasonably concluded that it had better accommodate the masses or else risk closing its doors.

What’s interesting about my pub’s decision is that the times haven’t changed all that much. The TVs didn’t suddenly arrive because they became current. They were added because somebody just gave in. There might have been a creative way to avoid such a catastrophe, a monthly subscription paid for by regulars, perhaps, or a joint-ownership scheme, as some pubs in Britain have turned to amid sinking profits.

The previous absence of screens certainly marked the establishment out as peculiar. In Canada, where there’s beer, supposedly there ought also to be entertainment, yet the irony is that historically, pubs were places where patrons supplied their own amusement. Singing, music and dancing were a regular feature of public houses well into the 20th century.

Today, pub songs are hardly more than a memory, and the music and dancing have mostly moved to other venues. And yet Canadians regularly flock to coffee shops as a space to relax and converse, demonstrating that it is still possible for meeting places that aren’t based around entertainment to thrive in our communities.

A pub that’s unapologetic about its raison d’être can encourage this appetite by embracing its calling to be an institution rather than just another restaurant. Pubs can just as easily be a ‘third place’ between home and the office as coffee shops are. The decision to become that rests with proprietors, who can choose not to take their cues from pure bar culture and instead curate a unique communal experience for a hungry and thirsty public.

To those who would frequent such institutions, if you can find one, support it and ask friends to join you in supporting it. If there isn’t a pub near you, start one. As the past few years have shown, community-owned pubs aren’t just a pipe dream, they’re a legitimate possibility.

There’s no reason for great pubs not to exist in Canada.

Perhaps we just need to ask ourselves what we really value in the communal spaces where we congregate, or even why we congregate in the first place. Is it to inebriate ourselves to the point of insensibility, in which case attractive surroundings are of no consequence? Is it to listen to music that we might have just as easily played through a set of headphones on the way over? Is it to fix our eyes on a television, taking less notice of those we came in with?

If the point of dining out is to make merry with those we care about, then the answer to all of the above is obviously no. Yet when even the most traditional establishments, like mine, can’t seem to satisfy and retain a loyal clientele, it would appear that most of us are not just missing the point of a pub, we can’t even recognise a good one when we see it in the wild.

D.C.C. (Danny) Randell is a doctoral student at the University of Buckingham. His writing has appeared in National Post, C2C Journal, and at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. Find more of his work at anachronicpen.substack.com.

Without Diminishment’s latest pub night is taking place in Calgary on March 20th. For tickets.