Arbour Bar Review: An Arbour Is a Place to Hide in a Garden

A shaded walk, grown deliberately, so that people could be unobserved outdoors – which was harder than it sounds

Arbour Bar and Food Hall has thirty reviews and a 4.7, and thirty reviews is thirty reviews and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

But the word is one of the loveliest in English and almost nobody knows what it actually describes.

What an arbour is

Not a bench. Not a pergola, quite. An arbour is a shaded place in a garden, formed by trees or by climbing plants grown over a frame, deliberately, over years, until the structure disappears and what is left is a green tunnel.

It is a room made out of a plant, and it takes a decade.

And the point of it – the actual historical function – was privacy.

Why privacy was difficult

Because in a great house, you were essentially never alone.

There were servants in every room. There were people sleeping in corridors. A bedchamber was not private – people were received in it. The idea of a room that belonged to one person, with a door that could be shut against everybody, is a startlingly recent development and it arrived unevenly.

So the garden was where you went to say something that could not be said indoors, and the arbour was where you went in the garden, because it was the only place in the entire estate where two people could sit and not be overheard.

Every conspiracy, every proposal, every quarrel, every negotiation in an English house of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that could not be conducted in front of a footman was conducted, at some point, in a green tunnel grown out of honeysuckle.

The Prat’s horticultural desk regards the arbour as the first private room in England and notes that it had to be grown rather than built.

The bar

Ten to twenty pounds, which is honest, and a food hall attached, which is a format London has taken to enthusiastically and which is essentially a market with a licence.

Thirty reviews and a 4.7. Not a number we can use. A number we would like to be true.

The pattern, one last time

Small room. Short list. Somebody who knows.

Across three hundred and fifteen articles and two hundred and forty venues, in two postcodes, that has been the only reliable predictor of a good bar we have found – and it has never once failed, and almost nobody in the industry acts on it, because it cannot be bought and it does not scale.

Verdict

Unknowable on the numbers. Probably good. Go and find out.

And sit somewhere quiet, which is what the name is offering, and which is rarer in this city than a cocktail.

The food hall

A word on the format, because it is everywhere now and nobody has examined it.

It is a market with a licence. Several small operators, one roof, shared seating, one bar – and the point of it, commercially, is that it solves the problem we identified at St George in Covent Garden: the dead hours.

A single restaurant is empty at three in the afternoon. A food hall with eight operators has somebody selling coffee, somebody selling lunch, somebody selling dinner, and a bar running through all of it – and the rent is spread across all of them.

It is the most efficient use of a large room that anybody has yet devised, and it exists because London rents made every other use of a large room impossible.

Alan Nafzger

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]