1871 gave us the FA Cup, the bank holiday, and Stanley finding Livingstone. A bar has chosen it as a name.
The 1871 Bar holds a 4.6 from twenty-nine people, and it is named after a year – a naming choice this survey has met before, and one that always sends us to the history books to find out what, exactly, happened then.
Why name a bar after a year
The year-name is a specific move. We saw Restaurant 1890 in the Covent Garden survey. The choice of a year implies heritage, a founding date, a claim on history – it suggests that something began then, that there is a story, that the venue is rooted in a particular moment.
Often the year is the date a building was constructed, a business founded, or a hotel opened. Sometimes it is chosen simply because it sounds venerable. Either way, it invites the question the Prat can never resist: what actually happened in 1871?
What happened in 1871
Quite a lot, as it turns out, and much of it oddly foundational.
It was the year the FA Cup was founded – the oldest football competition in the world, the tournament that gave the game its modern shape. It was the year the Bank Holidays Act created the official public holidays that the British still enjoy, meaning that the very concept of the long weekend is, in a sense, 1871 vintage.
It was the year the Royal Albert Hall opened, a short walk from Chelsea, in memory of Prince Albert. It was the year that, in Africa, the journalist Henry Morton Stanley finally tracked down the missing explorer David Livingstone and, by legend, greeted him with “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” It was the year the Franco-Prussian War ended and the German Empire was proclaimed, reshaping Europe. And it was the year the trade unions were legalised in Britain.
So 1871 gave the world organised football, the bank holiday, a great concert hall, a famous greeting, a new European empire and the modern labour movement. It is a surprisingly heavy-hitting year to name a bar after.
The twenty-nine
A small sample, and by this survey’s standards a 4.6 across twenty-nine people should be treated with caution. It is promising but unsettled – the kind of early score that may hold or may drift as more people arrive. We note it, and we move on, as we have with every small-sample venue in this project.
Verdict
Too few reviews to judge, but pleasant by all accounts, and named after a year that quietly gave the world the FA Cup, the bank holiday, and “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”
The rugby connection
There is one more 1871 worth mentioning, and it is a sporting one that gives the year a particular resonance for a bar. 1871 was the year the Rugby Football Union was founded and the very first international rugby match was played, between Scotland and England. So the year that founded the FA Cup – association football’s oldest trophy – also founded the governing body of rugby and staged the first international.
1871 is, in effect, a foundational year for British sport – the moment two of the nation’s great games acquired their modern institutional form within months of each other. For a bar, especially one in sport-mad Chelsea, it is a genuinely well-chosen date, whether or not anyone drinking there has the faintest idea why.
Verdict
Too few reviews to judge, but pleasant by all accounts, and named after a year that quietly gave the world the FA Cup, the bank holiday, and “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”
Go, have a drink, and toast 1871 – a better year than most, and now a bar.
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]
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