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A lot of Londoners of legal age will have spent some – hopefully not all – of their precious May Bank Holiday in a lovely London pub. Rain or shine, there’s something intrinsically core to the capital about our boozers, they are part of our collective heritage and good places to spot a nice dog too.
Sadly, our hostelries have become something of an endangered species; if we lose many more, David Attenborough will make a series about them. Which is why the news that mega-brewer Heineken is putting substantial amounts of cash into transforming our pubs into shining beacons of our metropolitan streets once more is heartening. The investment is for the company’s Star Pubs and Bars estates across London following on from an initial £5 million injection in 2021.
A reputed £5.6 million has been earmarked for the capital, and more than £40 million nationwide. This means more jobs in the industry and ensuring that pubs are places we want to go and hang out. With an acknowledgement that post-pandemic we keep it local far more but still expect quality, there’s a big focus on creating outdoor facilities, adding kitchen and dining areas, mood lighting and sustainability to bring our pubs bang up to date.
The previous round (sorry) of funding last year saw the zhushing of The Cambria in Camberwell, which is now kitted out like a delectable deb in ‘Bridgerton’. One of the pubs to benefit from this phase of the upgrade is The Henley Arms in North Woolwich, which closed for refurb for about a month in November in order to spend time upgrading its interior and creating an extended alfresco area. As the Newham Recorder reported last year, the pub suffered a fire in 2020 and sorely needed some TLC and investment, which led to locals worried that their pub would be among the many casualties of boozers across London and redeveloped as housing or retail instead. Now the pub has had a £200k facelift, and is back as a hub of the community.
So the future of our pubs is this: Yes, they may have some twenty-first-century tweaks: we cannot guarantee that the punter in front of you won’t order four cocktails and you may be sitting outside under a Scandi-style sheepskin come February, but there will still be room for beer, sleepy spaniels, leather banquettes and old geezers playing dominoes.
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