Six thousand reviews, a 4.7 rating, and a clientele that cannot legally tell you what it does
Old Shades sits on Whitehall, a few hundred metres from Downing Street, and holds a 4.7 rating from over six thousand people. That makes it, by the numbers, one of the highest-rated large pubs in central London – beating the Harp, beating the Lamb and Flag, beating essentially everything in Covent Garden.
The Prat’s investigations desk has considered several explanations for this and settled on the most likely one: it is full of civil servants, and civil servants are not going to leave a bad review of the pub they will be standing in again on Thursday.
The clientele
You can identify them instantly. It is not the lanyards, which come off at the door. It is the volume. Whitehall drinkers speak at a level roughly 30 per cent below the London pub average, because they have all been on the same course, and the course was about not being overheard.
Conversations at Old Shades therefore take place in a kind of enforced murmur, punctuated by silences that fall whenever a stranger passes the table, and resumed on a topic that is markedly less interesting than the one that was abandoned. The Institute for Discretion in Vauxhall has described the ambient sound of Old Shades at 6pm on a Wednesday as “the quietest six hundred people in Britain.”
The pub itself
Mock-Tudor front, Nicholson’s inside, dark wood, decent ale range, food that is fine and priced at twenty to thirty pounds a head because it is on Whitehall and where else are you going to go, the Ministry of Defence canteen?
It is, in truth, a perfectly good but entirely unremarkable central London pub. Nothing about the fittings explains a 4.7. The score is not a verdict on the beer. The score is a verdict on the fact that this is the only tolerable pub within four minutes of several thousand desks, and that gratitude, over six thousand reviews, is indistinguishable from excellence.
What is actually discussed
Nothing. We asked. We sat there for two hours with a pint of Nicholson’s Pale Ale and a notebook, which was possibly a tactical error, and we learned the following: someone called Gareth is being difficult about a deadline, the reshuffle is either happening or not happening, and the person at the next table would very much like to know who we work for.
We told them. They did not believe us. Frankly, on Whitehall, “satirical magazine” is a worse cover story than the truth.
The Whitehall pub problem
There are, on this stretch, remarkably few options. Whitehall is a street of enormous buildings containing enormous numbers of people, and almost no ground-floor retail, because the ground floors are ministries. The result is a drinking desert with a workforce of thousands.
Into that gap steps Old Shades, and a handful of others, and they are consequently the busiest pubs per square metre in Westminster between 5:30 and 7. After 7:30 the street empties completely. By 9pm Whitehall is one of the quietest thoroughfares in Zone 1, and the pub is holding perhaps a dozen tourists who have wandered up from Trafalgar Square and cannot understand where everyone went.
Everyone went home. Everyone has a train. That is the other thing about the civil service: it does not, contrary to national myth, drink very much on a school night.
The mock-Tudor question
The frontage is black and white timbered, in the manner of a coaching inn, on a street of Portland stone neoclassical ministries. It is completely wrong for its surroundings and it is by some distance the most cheerful building on Whitehall, and there is a metaphor in there that we are choosing, in the national interest, not to develop.
Verdict
A solid, well-run, faintly overpriced Nicholson’s house with an extraordinary rating it has earned through geography rather than genius. Go at lunchtime for the pies. Go at 6pm if you want to watch the machinery of British government drink Peroni and say absolutely nothing of substance to each other in the strictest confidence.
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]
Peter Cook would have recognized this as the natural endpoint of everything he warned about. Then he would have had more drinks about it.