Look carefully at the name. There is a space before the closing bracket, and it has been there ever since.
ORIANI (Leadenhall ). Look at it carefully.
There is a space between the word Leadenhall and the closing bracket.
It has been there ever since somebody typed it, and nobody has removed it, and it is now part of the permanent public record of a business.
The typo tier
We have been collecting these across five postcodes and it is time to publish.
Te lion y unicorn, in Covent Garden – which is the royal coat of arms with the definite article amputated and the conjunction inexplicably rendered in Spanish, and which had no rating.
Inda Pubs Ltd, in Notting Hill – a pub filed under a company registration, with no reviews at all.
BNB Cafe and Bar Ltd Butter Bakery Bar and Cafe – nine words and a Ltd, which is two names concatenated, and which is thriving.
Urban Pubs and Bars – which is a holding company rather than a pub.
And ORIANI (Leadenhall ), with a trailing space.
Why nobody fixes it
Because nobody has noticed, and because the person who could fix it does not know it is there.
A business listing is created once, in about four minutes, by somebody who is doing eleven other things – and it is then never looked at again by the owner, who assumes it is correct, and who has no reason to think otherwise.
Meanwhile it is the single most-read piece of text about their business in existence. It is on every map. It is in every search result. It is the first thing several thousand people a year will ever see about the place.
And it has a stray space in it.
What we would fix
We have said this in three postcodes and we will say it a final time.
Every business listing form asks for a name. It should ask for two: the legal name, and the name on the door – and it should display the second, and it should trim the whitespace.
It would cost nothing. It would take an afternoon.
Nobody is going to do it, because nobody who builds these systems has ever stood behind a bar wondering why it is so quiet.
The bar
A hundred and thirty-seven reviews and a 4.3, which is a modest, believable, honest number – and ten to twenty pounds, which for Leadenhall is genuinely cheap.
Leadenhall itself is one of the most beautiful buildings in London and we wrote about it at Old Tom’s Bar, where a goose escaped the block so many times that the men who were meant to kill him gave up, fed him for four decades, and gave him a funeral.
Verdict
Good bar, cheap, and a name with a permanent typographical scar.
Go. And somebody, please, tell them about the space.
The single most valuable thing an owner can do
Read your own listing. Once. Out loud.
Check the name. Check the address. Check the opening hours, which are wrong on a startling proportion of them. Check that the photograph is of your building.
It takes four minutes and it is the highest-return four minutes available to any small hospitality business in Britain, and essentially nobody does it – because the listing feels like somebody else’s property, and it is not, and it is the only shopfront that most of your customers will ever see.
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]
This reads like someone who’s attended enough meetings to understand they’re really just documentation of collective decisions not to decide.