Victorian tiling was boarded over in the 1980s and forgotten, and somebody found it again in 2013
The Well and Bucket on Bethnal Green Road holds a 4.4 from eighteen hundred and seventy-five people, charges twenty to thirty pounds, and it has one of the best Victorian tiled interiors in London.
Nobody knew it was there.
The wall
The pub was boarded up, and at some point in the late twentieth century the walls were covered – plasterboard, panelling, whatever was cheap – and the tiles went behind them.
And there they stayed.
The building fell out of use. It was, at one stage, a leather warehouse.
And when it was taken on again and the boards came off, an entire scheme of Victorian ceramic work was standing behind them, essentially intact, having been protected from a hundred years of smoke and fashion by the very act of being hidden.
Which is the mechanism
And we have found it in every postcode of this survey.
The things that survive are the things nobody could be bothered to improve.
The Argyll Arms in Soho still has its snob screens – etched glass at face height so that the classes could not see each other drink – and it has them because nobody knocked the compartments through in the 1970s, when almost everybody else did.
The Prince Alfred in Maida Vale still has all five separate bars and five separate doors.
The Palm Tree in Mile End still has its horseshoe bar and its red velvet because the streets around it were bombed and nobody ever came back to modernise it.
Not one of these buildings was preserved. They were neglected, and neglect turned out to be the most effective conservation policy in British history.
What the tiles are for
Hygiene, originally, and it is worth knowing.
A Victorian pub was a filthy place – sawdust on the floor, tobacco, spitting, gas lighting depositing soot on everything – and a tiled surface can be washed with a bucket in a way that a painted or papered wall cannot.
So the great pub tiling schemes are not decoration that happens to be practical. They are a practical solution that somebody then made beautiful, because the tile-makers of the period were extremely good and because a brewery wanted its houses to look prosperous.
Function first. The ornament came after.
Which is exactly the Bauhaus argument we found at A Bar with Shapes for a Name, four streets from here, arriving from the opposite direction sixty years early.
The name
A well and a bucket. It is one of the eight honest names in this survey – a thing that was there, and a thing you used to get water out of it, and no symbolism whatsoever.
The Institute for Vernacular Naming in Barking rates it Category One and notes that it is the only category that is reliably true.
Verdict
Excellent pub, superb room. Go, and look at the walls, and know they were saved by being ignored.
What we lost anyway
Most of it, and the numbers are grim.
The great majority of Victorian pub interiors in Britain were destroyed – not by bombs, and not by neglect, but by refurbishment, in the 1960s and 70s, when pub companies knocked the compartments through into single large rooms because one room is cheaper to staff and holds more people.
The screens went in skips. The etched glass went in skips. The mahogany was sold.
There is a national inventory of the ones that survived. It is not long.
And essentially every entry on it survived for the same reason: somebody could not afford to modernise it, or somebody forgot.
Somewhere someone’s sending this to their boss with the message “is this us?” The answer is going to be yes.
This is what happens when someone documents British dysfunction with precision instead of vague complaining.