Maida Vale’s Victorian pub has snob screens – pivoting glass panels installed so that the classes could drink without looking at each other
The Prince Alfred on Formosa Street is one of the most completely preserved Victorian pub interiors in Britain, and the reason to go is the screens.
They sit on top of the bar counter: small panels of etched glass, mounted on pivots, at exactly the height of a standing adult’s face.
They are called snob screens. They exist so that the customer on one side could not see the customer on the other, and – crucially – so that the barman could not see either of them properly, and so that a gentleman could take a drink in a public house without being observed doing it by a person he considered beneath him.
The five bars
The pub is divided into five separate compartments, each with its own door onto the street, each walled off from the others by wood and glass, and each connected to the same central servery.
Five bars. Five doors. Five prices, historically – because a public bar and a saloon bar sold the same beer at different rates, and the difference in price bought you a carpet, a seat, and the absence of the working man.
This was not an aesthetic. It was architecture as social control, and it was standard, and almost all of it has been ripped out of almost every pub in England – knocked through in the 1960s and 70s to make one big room, because one big room is easier to staff and because nobody wanted to be reminded.
The Prince Alfred still has all five. So, in a smaller way, does the Windsor Castle on Campden Hill, and the Salisbury on St Martin’s Lane still has the etched glass, and beyond that there is very little left in London.
The doorways
They are tiny. To move between the compartments you have to duck through a low, narrow opening at waist-and-shoulder height, bent almost double.
Every visitor does it and every visitor laughs. And the joke is on us, because those openings were not for customers. Customers were not supposed to move between the bars at all. The openings are for staff, and they are small deliberately, and the awkwardness you are experiencing is a hundred and forty years of a building telling you to stay where you were put.
The 4.2
Which is a moderate score from two thousand people, and the reviews explain it: it is cramped, the compartments are small, and getting a table involves negotiating a Victorian obstacle course while carrying drinks.
The thing that makes it historically extraordinary is exactly the thing that makes it inconvenient. The Prat has seen this trade-off before – the Harp, best pub in Britain, is a corridor – and the finding is always the same: the buildings that survived are the ones nobody bothered to improve.
Verdict
Go for the screens. Stand at the bar, look through the glass at a stranger who cannot quite see you, and understand that this was the point, and that somebody paid a joiner to make it happen.
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]
The thing about it for educators is it provides material for teaching how to analyze institutional reality.