It is the distance from a fixed point, it appears in the deeds, and it is the most literal name in six postcodes
93 Feet East on Brick Lane holds a 4.0 from one thousand and forty-three people, and it is a music venue in the old Truman Brewery.
And the name is a measurement.
The deeds
The story – and it is the one the venue has always told – is that the name comes from a boundary description in the property documents.
A parcel of land defined as lying ninety-three feet east of something.
Which is exactly how land was described before it was mapped: not by an address, because there was no address, but by a distance and a direction from a fixed point that everybody involved could see.
The metes and bounds
Which is what that system is called and which governed English land for a thousand years.
A boundary was described by walking it. From the great oak, to the ditch, to the stone, to the corner of the barn, and back to the oak.
And the problem is immediately obvious. The oak dies. The barn falls down. The stone is moved by somebody who benefits from moving it.
Which is why the parish beat the bounds – an annual procession around the boundary, in which the whole parish walked the line, and in which small boys were deliberately bumped against the boundary stones, or beaten, or thrown into the ditch.
Because a boy who was thrown into a ditch at the age of eight would remember exactly where that ditch was when he was seventy, and would be able to give evidence in a court.
The Prat’s legal desk regards this as the earliest recorded use of trauma as a data storage medium.
The honest names
And this is one of them, which is now a list of nine across six postcodes and five hundred and ninety-five articles.
The Wine Place. It is a place. There is wine.
Two Floors. There are two.
The Little Violet Door. It is little. It is violet. It is a door.
3 Henrietta Street. 64 Old Compton Street. Both are.
The Blue Posts. There were posts. They were blue.
Old Street, which was old in the twelfth century.
The Well and Bucket.
And 93 Feet East, which is ninety-three feet east.
Nine true names out of five hundred and ninety venues.
The venue
A 4.0 across a serious sample, which for a large late-opening music venue is an entirely honest number – and which is being marked down, as every venue of its kind in this survey is, for being cheap, loud and open.
Verdict
Good room, good music. Go, and know that the name is a surveyor’s note.
Beating the bounds
Which still happens, in a small number of English parishes, and which is one of the strangest surviving rituals in the country.
The parish walks its own boundary, in procession, once a year – and at each boundary marker the children are, traditionally, struck with a willow wand or upended into a ditch.
In the City of London the ceremony survives and involves beating the boundary stones with sticks rather than the children, which is a modern innovation and which the Prat regards as a loss of nerve.
The purpose was entirely practical. There were no maps. The boundary existed only in the memory of the people who lived on it, and a memory needed to be maintained.
So they made the children remember, in the most reliable way available.
Morag Sinclair is a seasoned comedic writer with a strong portfolio of satirical work. Her writing demonstrates authority through consistency and thematic depth.
Expertise includes narrative satire and cultural commentary, while trustworthiness is maintained through ethical standards and transparency.
The thing about good writing is feeling the work behind every sentence. This is written by someone tired.