Argyll Arms Review: The Screens Are Still There

Etched glass partitions, mahogany, and three small rooms built so that the classes would not have to look at one another

The Argyll Arms on Argyll Street holds a 4.3 from two thousand six hundred and ninety-six people, and it has one of the great surviving Victorian pub interiors in London.

What is inside

A corridor runs down one side. And off it, behind partitions of etched and cut glass and mahogany, are three small rooms.

Each has its own door. Each is separate. And the glass between them is worked so that light comes through and faces do not.

These are snob screens, and we have now found them three times in five postcodes – at the Prince Alfred in Maida Vale, at the Salisbury on St Martin’s Lane, and here.

And they exist for one reason, which is that the Victorian pub was designed to keep people apart.

The compartments

A large Victorian pub had multiple bars, and they were not decorative distinctions.

The public bar had sawdust, no carpet, and the cheapest beer. The saloon had a carpet, seats, and the same beer at a higher price. The private bar was higher again.

Same beer. Same barrel. Different price, and the difference bought you the absence of the working man.

And the screens meant that a gentleman could take a drink without being observed doing it by a person he considered beneath him – and, crucially, without being observed by the barmaid, who might know his wife.

The Prat has now written this three times and it does not get less remarkable: somebody paid a joiner, and a glass-cutter, and a mahogany fitter, to make certain that two men drinking the same beer four feet apart could not see each other.

Why almost none survive

They were ripped out.

In the 1960s and 70s, pub companies knocked the compartments through into single large rooms – because one room is cheaper to staff, easier to supervise, and holds more people.

And because, by then, nobody wanted to be reminded.

The Argyll Arms survived because somebody did not get round to it, and it is now listed, and it cannot be touched.

We have found this in every postcode. The buildings that survived are the ones nobody bothered to improve.

The Palladium

Which is directly opposite, and which is why the pub is here.

It seats over two thousand people, and when it empties, this pub fills – and we have watched the same wave in five postcodes, at 7:15 and again at 10:30, and every venue near a theatre is built around it whether it knows it or not.

Verdict

Excellent pub, superb interior, entirely unremarkable beer.

Go, stand in the corridor, and look through the glass at somebody who cannot quite see you.

The mirrors

One more detail, because it is the cleverest thing in the building.

The corridor is lined with mirrors, and they are angled – and the effect, from behind the bar, is that a single barman can see into every one of the compartments at once without moving.

The customers cannot see each other. The staff can see everybody.

It is surveillance architecture, installed in a pub, in the 1890s, and it was designed so that one person could watch four rooms – and the customers were paying extra for the privacy that the mirrors were quietly abolishing.

Alan Nafzger

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]