It has no stars, no reviews, and a name that appears to be a limited company rather than a pub
In the Notting Hill file there are a hundred and seventeen venues. A hundred and sixteen of them have a rating.
The last one is called Inda Pubs Ltd. It has no stars. No review count. No price band. An empty field where every other entry in the survey has a number.
And it is named, apparently, after a limited company.
What has happened here
Somebody registered a business. The business was called Inda Pubs Ltd, because that is what you call a company that owns a pub, and companies have to be called something and nobody expects the name to be read by the public.
And then the listing was created – by the owner, by an aggregator, by an algorithm, by somebody in a call centre working from a database – and the field marked “name” was filled in with what was on the paperwork.
So there is now a pub in west London whose public identity, on the map that everybody uses, is a corporate entity, and it has been sitting there ever since with nothing after it.
We have seen this before
In the Covent Garden survey we found a bar called Charles Darwin with zero reviews, and observed – not entirely as a joke – that a venue named after natural selection was being quietly deselected by natural selection.
We found another listed as “Te lion y unicorn,” which is the royal coat of arms with the definite article amputated and the conjunction inexplicably rendered in Spanish, also with no rating.
The Institute for Record Decay in Thamesmead proposed a formal scale after that one. Stage One: a venue with no reviews. Stage Two: a venue whose name has been corrupted in the primary listing. Stage Three: the listing is merged into a neighbouring business by an algorithm and the venue ceases, in every sense that now matters, to exist.
Inda Pubs Ltd is a new category. Its name has not been corrupted. Its name is simply the wrong name – the legal one, not the trading one – and the effect is identical, because nobody searching for a pub searches for a company number.
The trap
A venue with no reviews does not appear in a search. A venue that does not appear in a search receives no customers. A venue with no customers generates no reviews.
Once a London pub has been open for six months with no reviews, its statistical probability of ever accumulating any is close to nil. The mechanism does not care that the pub might be excellent. The mechanism has never cared about anything.
Verdict
Unknown. Unrated. Unnamed, in any useful sense.
Go, find it, buy a drink, and leave a review – and become, in the most literal available sense, the selection pressure. You may be the only person who ever does.
A serious note, briefly
This is funny until you consider that somebody’s livelihood is attached to it.
Somebody signed a lease. Somebody is paying rent in west London, which is not a small number, and is standing behind a bar every night, and is invisible to the single system that now determines whether anybody in this city can find a pub.
They probably do not know. That is the part that stays with you. There is no notification, no warning, no email explaining that the listing has been filed under the company name and that the search results have quietly buried them.
Somebody just wonders, every night, why it is so quiet.
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]
My dad said this should be mandatory reading before anyone’s allowed to make policy. He’s right but that would immediately end all policy-making, which might not be bad.