Arthur’s table had no head, on purpose. This one is a pub off St Martin’s Lane with a 4.4 and no visible constitutional theory.
The Round Table takes its name from the table at which King Arthur seated his knights, and the entire point of that table – the only reason anybody has ever remembered it – is that it has no head.
A rectangular table has a top. Somebody sits at it. Everybody else is ranked by distance from him.
A round table has no top, no foot, and no seniority. It is a piece of furniture designed to make a political argument, and the argument is that nobody here outranks anybody else.
The most radical object in English legend
This is worth sitting with, because it gets treated as decoration and it is not.
The legend is medieval. It emerges in a society organised entirely around rank – a society in which where you sat, who you spoke to first, and who ate before you were matters of law rather than manners.
And into that world, the story inserts a king who builds a table specifically so that his knights cannot be ranked, and who sits at it as an equal.
It is a fantasy. It never happened. But somebody in the twelfth century thought it, and wrote it down, and it has never gone away, and every time a group of people wants to signal that this discussion will be conducted between equals, they use the phrase. Round table talks. A round table discussion. Nobody says rectangular.
The pub
Twelve hundred reviews, a 4.4, ten to twenty pounds. Small, tucked into a court off St Martin’s Lane, near the theatres, dark inside, busy at six.
The tables are not round. We checked. This is not a criticism – it is a small courtyard pub and round tables are a spectacularly inefficient use of floor space, which is presumably why Arthur, who had a castle, could afford one and a Covent Garden landlord cannot.
The Prat’s furniture desk notes that the entire history of the round table as an idea is a history of people who could afford the floor space, and that this is not incidental to the politics of it.
The theatre crowd, one last time
Like the Salisbury, like the Chandos, like Le Garrick and Joe Allen, this pub lives and dies on the West End clock. Full at six, empty at half past seven, full again at ten.
The difference is that the Round Table is small enough that the wave genuinely empties it. At 7:25 you can watch fifty people leave a room that holds sixty, and the silence afterwards is one of the strangest things in Covent Garden.
The Siege Perilous
One seat at Arthur’s table was left empty. It was called the Siege Perilous, and it was reserved for the knight who would achieve the Grail, and any other man who sat in it would be destroyed.
Which rather undermines the whole no-hierarchy proposition, and the Prat has always found it the most revealing detail in the legend: even in a fantasy explicitly designed to abolish rank, somebody could not resist installing one seat that was better than the others and lethal to the unworthy.
There is no Siege Perilous in this pub. There is a stool by the door that is always taken by the same man, which is the closest available equivalent.
Verdict
Good small pub, excellent name, entirely wrong furniture. Go at eight, when the theatre crowd has gone and the room is yours, and sit at a rectangular table under a sign celebrating the most famous argument for equality in English literature.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Someone thinking about moving somewhere. You won’t because it’s identical everywhere which is worse.