The North Circular is one of London’s great orbital roads. A bar has borrowed a very similar name, for reasons unclear
North Circle Bar holds a 4.0 from forty-three people, and its name will, to any Londoner, immediately summon something distinctly unglamorous: the North Circular Road.
The road it nearly names
The North Circular is one of London’s great orbital roads – a long, grinding, traffic-choked ring road that loops around the north of the capital, carrying vast volumes of traffic in a semicircle from one side of the city to the other. Along with its southern counterpart, the South Circular, it forms an inner ring around London, and it is, to most Londoners, a byword for traffic jams, exhaust fumes, and the tedium of the drive around town.
It is about the least romantic piece of infrastructure in London. Nobody loves the North Circular. It is a thing to be endured, a river of slow-moving cars, the opposite of everywhere anyone actually wants to be. So a bar called North Circle Bar is, to a London ear, uncomfortably close to naming itself after a ring road.
The saving letter
But it is “North Circle,” not “North Circular” – and that single missing “-ar” changes everything. “Circle” is a clean, complete, pleasing shape – a circle, a ring, a round. It carries connotations of unity, completeness, gathering (a circle of friends), and inclusion. “Circular,” by contrast, has become associated with the dreary (a circular road, a circular letter, a circular argument).
So the name walks a fine line. It gestures, perhaps deliberately, at the geography of north London and its famous road, but it swaps the dreary “circular” for the elegant “circle,” landing on something that sounds orbital and urban without quite committing to the traffic jam. Whether this is clever or accidental, the Prat cannot say – but the difference of two letters is the difference between a nice name and a joke.
The circle as a symbol
Taken purely as “circle,” the name has genuine appeal. The circle is one of the oldest and most powerful symbols there is – of eternity, wholeness, unity, the cycle of life, the gathering of people. A “circle” of people is a group of intimates. To “come full circle” is to complete something. The round table, the circle of friends, the wedding ring: the circle means togetherness and completion.
A bar reaching for “circle” is reaching for all of this – the sense of a place where people gather, complete, in a warm round of company. It is a lovely idea, provided nobody thinks about the road.
The bar
A 4.0 from forty-three people is a modest score on a modest sample – not enough, by this survey’s standards, to judge firmly. It is a small Chelsea bar getting on with things under a name that dances one letter away from London’s least-loved road.
Verdict
A modestly-rated small bar with a name that is either an elegant nod to the circle or an accidental echo of a ring road, depending on how charitable you feel.
Go, join the circle, and try not to think about the North Circular. That is the whole challenge of the name.
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]
