Six hundred and forty-seven articles, five postcodes, four hundred and seventy venues – and it ends with nothing
It is called secret bar. Lowercase.
It has no rating. No reviews. No price band. Nothing at all.
It is the last venue in the file, and the six hundred and forty-seventh article, and it is the perfect way to finish.
The joke, which is not a joke
A bar called secret bar, which is invisible to the system that determines whether anybody in this city can find a drink, has succeeded completely.
It is a secret. It is doing exactly what it says.
And it is the sixth venue we have found with no number at all – after Charles Darwin in Covent Garden, being quietly deselected by natural selection; Inda Pubs Ltd; SiNK Pong; the Royal Exchange, standing under an eleven-foot gold grasshopper that has survived two fires; and ESG Sweet Bar.
What the speakeasy actually was
Since this is the last time we will get to say it.
A speakeasy was a bar you could be arrested in. The word now means a bar with a rope.
And the entire London hidden-bar phenomenon is not an aesthetic movement at all. It is a rent gradient – because ground-floor retail goes to whoever generates the most per square foot, and that is never a bar.
So the bar went into a basement, or behind a door, or up a staircase.
And then, having been driven underground by a lease, the industry discovered that a windowless room is a genuinely better place to drink. Sound behaves. Temperature is stable. There is no daylight to remind you of the time.
Every velvet rope in this city is a lease negotiation in fancy dress – and it turned out to be an improvement, and nobody planned it.
What we found
Five postcodes. Four hundred and seventy venues. Six hundred and forty-seven articles.
A pump that killed six hundred people and founded a science. A goose who could not be killed and was mourned. A monument that is secretly a telescope. Five million books burning in one night. Newton in these pubs in disguise, sending twenty-eight men to the gallows. A footman selling the Queen’s candle stubs and founding Fortnum and Mason. A woman on a stool paying Francis Bacon to bring his friends. A man in a jumpsuit putting his arm round his guitarist on live television.
None of it is on any of the signs. All of it is true.
And the numbers
The star rating does not measure the venue. It measures the gap between what somebody expected when they pushed the door and what they got.
Thirteen matched sets proved it. Five Be At Ones. Four Simmons. Three All Bar Ones. Three Cocktail Clubs. Two Bootleggers – one on a 5.0 from twenty-two people, one on a 4.3 from five hundred and twenty-six, and they are the same bar.
And the formula
It has not changed once in six hundred and forty-seven articles.
A small room. A short list. Somebody behind the bar who has tasted everything on it and would like to tell you about it.
Not one high-rated venue in five postcodes was themed. Not one had a rope.
And one thing we never found
Orwell’s pub. The Moon Under Water – ten qualities, described in loving detail in 1946, with a garden and a swing in it.
And in the last paragraph he admits there is no such place. He knew pubs with eight of the ten. Never all ten.
Neither did we.
Verdict
No rating. No reviews. Nothing.
Go and find it. That is the whole review, and it is the last one.
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]
