Hux Bar Review: Three Letters, and Nothing to Hold On To

Eighty-six reviews, a 4.3, and a name so short that it cannot be wrong about anything

Hux. Three letters. Eighty-six reviews, a 4.3, ten to fifty pounds.

And a name that has achieved something no other venue in either survey has managed: it is completely impervious to us.

Nothing to attack

We have spent three hundred and thirteen articles taking pub names apart.

The Elephant and Castle is a cutler’s badge and not a Spanish princess. The Churchill Arms was named forty-eight years before Winston was born. Old Speckled Hen is a car. The Castle has no castle. The Hand and Flower means nothing. Theodore Bullfrog never existed. Inda Pubs Ltd is a company registration. Te lion y unicorn is the royal arms, mangled by a listing.

Every one of them made a claim, and every one of them could be checked, and almost every one of them turned out to be wrong.

Hux makes no claim. There is nothing to check. It is not a word, it is not a name, it is not a year, it is not a number, it is not an animal and it is not a lie.

It is three letters that have been arranged so that nobody else owns them.

The end point

We predicted this at Bar 182.52. The Institute for Nominal Exhaustion in Erith forecast that within a decade the majority of new London bars would be named after strings that have never appeared in any language.

Hux is that. It is the terminus of the whole process.

Every real word in English is registered. Every combination of two real words has been tried. The puns are exhausted, the abstractions are taken, the numbers have been done, and somebody has already used a decimal point.

What is left is phonemes. Short, sharp, pronounceable, memorable, meaningless, and available on every platform simultaneously – and that last clause is the only one that anybody in the room was actually thinking about.

Is it worse

Honestly? No.

A name that means nothing is at least not lying to you. It is not claiming a princess it does not have, or a hen that was a car, or a fifteen-inch alley that is thirty-three.

Hux is a handle, which is all a pub name has ever needed to be – we argued exactly this at the Castle – and it will do its job perfectly. Two people can agree to meet there. That is the entire specification.

The bar

Eighty-six reviews and a 4.3 is a modest, honest, believable number. Small room. It is the configuration that produces the best bars in both surveys and also several that quietly closed.

Verdict

Go. Have a drink. And enjoy the one venue in three hundred and thirteen articles that we have been completely unable to catch out.

What we would have called it

After three hundred articles we have earned the right to an opinion, and it is this.

Name it after something that happened on the ground you are standing on.

Every district in this city is sitting on top of something extraordinary that nobody has bothered to look up. A gibbeted assassin. A racecourse killed by mud. A river in a pipe. A gate where you paid to pass. A pasture where a million sheep a year stopped to fatten.

It is free. It is true. It cannot be registered by anybody else. And it would give the room a reason to exist beyond the fact that a lease came up.

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]