If your pub is painted mostly grey or has an industrial look, it probably feels old-fashioned. The best modern pubs are just Victorian enough.
These thoughts were prompted by The Crown Inn in Stockport, of course, but also by The Kings Head here in Bristol, where we find ourselves drinking at least once per week these days.
Both pubs have a whiff of heritage and historical authenticity about them. If you didn’t know better, you might think they’d barely changed since the 1890s.
But, in fact, these are recent refurbishment jobs that lean into the age of the building and feature light-touch changes.
When The Kings Head reopened a few years ago the most visible change was the addition of William Morris wallpaper to the walls. The wallpaper was new but the design was of a similar vintage to the historic back bar. So, it felt fresh and old at the same time.
The wallpaper in question is dark green and that feels like one of the key old-fashioned modern pub tones. At The Crown Inn there’s a Green Room and a Red Room, which clues you into the other: a rich, warm colour in the territory of oxblood, echoing the leather on the seats.
What these colours also echo, now we think about it, are the two chambers of the Palace of Westminster. The benches are green in the House of Commons and red in the House of Lords.
The Pembury Tavern in Hackney is another pub that had a total makeover in recent years. The building is Victorian but the interior is a big, blank space, with historic partitions long gone and previous owners who were committed to white-walled minimalism.
Under the stewardship of Five Points, it’s gained stretches of dark green wallpaint, dark red seat coverings, and well-worn wood furniture and fittings.
Wood is, of course, another key feature of this type of pub. Not fresh wood that glows orange, or smells of creosote, but that looks as if it’s been rubbed smooth by thousands of hands and bums. You might find old church pews, too, for a borrowed sense of authenticity and antiquity.
The Pembury also has some clever typographic work with signs in a chunky Victorian-style Gothic sans-serif font that is both crisp (modern) and in line with the original carved stone sign that sits on top of the building.
Similarly, at The Kings Head, the typography evokes the Art Nouveau period. The back bar also comes with an array of mirrored, gilded signs with various examples of Victorian lettering, tying the past to the present. Oh, and, of course, there are Britannia tables, which we also observed at The Crown Inn.
When we first visited Cask, the first Craft Beer Company pub in Pimlico, a few weeks after it opened in 2009, we found some pretty functional decor in line with what we might now call the micropub style. That is, white walls, pale wood, with pumpclips and beer mats pinned up in an attempt to fill the empty space. When the chain began to expand, however, it pioneered the use of vintage advertising and modern versions of the Brilliant Sign to find a style that felt both modern and respectful of the past.
We recall the Islington branch, which opened in 2012 and closed in 2020, feeling like a leap forward in terms of atmosphere. And guess how they did it? (If you don’t remember.) That’s right: dark green walls, dark red carpet, wood, vintage signs…
There’s nothing new here, of course. Back in the 1950s and sixties pubs like The Champion in Fitzrovia were given Victorian-ish makeovers by designers and architects like Roderick Gradidge. And the wonderfully old skool Highbury Vaults in Bristol – still a gorgeous pub – was pretty much a creation of the in-house designer for Smiles in the 1990s.
It’s interesting how pub companies and big brewers are often so inept at evoking any real sense of history. They’re anxious about their premises being perceived as ‘old fashioned’ so they slap rental-flat grey paint on everything, or chase c.2011 craft beer bar chic with bare brick and uncomfortable scaffolding-pole furniture.
Or, when they do try to lean into the history of their buildings, they do so without much taste or sensitivity. These days, that means whacking “Ye Olde Pube” and “Gin Emporium” on the walls in bad fonts that come preloaded with Microsoft Word.
The other key component of a modern old-fashioned pub is, of course, decent beer. The Kings Head, The Crown Inn and The Pembury all have interesting ranges, served in great condition, often in particularly nice glassware.
The 10-sided 1930s-style pint glasses with which The Kings Head relaunched seem to have disappeared (stolen, we assume) but there are a couple of authentic 1930s half-pint glasses in the same style. Drinking a 21st century keg craft beer from one of those, with its GR stamp, perhaps gets at the point we’re trying to make better than anything we’ve written above. The new in the old. The old embracing the new. Meaningful threads and connections.
