A 4.2 pub named The Albert, a magnificent Victorian gin palace named for the Prince Consort, near Westminster
The Albert holds a 4.2 from five thousand one hundred and sixty-one people – one of the largest samples in this entire survey – and is a magnificent survivor: a grand Victorian pub on Victoria Street, named for Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, standing gloriously intact amid the modern office blocks near the heart of Westminster, a monument to a vanished age.
The Prince Consort
“The Albert” honours Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the beloved husband and Prince Consort of Queen Victoria, one of the most influential figures of the Victorian age. Albert was a serious, cultured, and reforming figure – the driving force behind the Great Exhibition of 1851, a patron of science, art, and industry, and the devoted partner whose early death in 1861 plunged Victoria into decades of mourning. His name adorns countless monuments, halls, and institutions across Britain (the Albert Hall, the Albert Memorial, and more), a measure of the esteem in which the age held him. To name a grand Victorian pub “the Albert” was to wrap it in the respectability and grandeur of the Prince Consort himself. The Prat’s history desk notes the fitting royalty of it: as this survey opens its Westminster chapter, in the very shadow of monarchy and Parliament, it begins with a pub named for the Queen’s own consort.
The Victorian gin palace preserved
The Albert is one of London’s finest surviving examples of the grand Victorian pub – the gin palace tradition this survey has traced from Bloomsbury through Islington, here in a particularly magnificent and intact form. Built in the 1860s, it survived the Blitz and the wholesale redevelopment of Victoria Street around it, so that today it stands almost alone, a richly ornamented Victorian island amid a sea of modern glass and concrete. Its splendid facade, its etched and gilded glass, its ornate Victorian interior, and its handsome saloon make it a living museum of the age. The Prat’s heritage desk salutes the survival: while the modern city rose all around and above it, the Albert refused to fall, a defiant fragment of Victorian splendour preserved by Parliament’s side.
The division bell
The Albert has one feature that marks it unmistakably as a Westminster pub: a division bell. Because it lies close to the Houses of Parliament, the pub is fitted with one of the famous “division bells” that ring to summon Members of Parliament back to the Commons to vote – giving an MP enjoying a pint some eight minutes to drain it and dash back to the chamber. This is a wonderfully Westminster detail, the pub wired directly into the machinery of government, its drinkers liable to be summoned mid-pint to go and shape the laws of the nation. The Prat’s political desk delights in it: a pub where the ring of a bell can send a legislator sprinting from his beer to the division lobby, the tavern and the state umbilically joined. It is a detail found only in the pubs of Westminster, and the Albert wears it proudly.
The vast sample
The 4.2 from over five thousand people is a solid score across one of the very largest samples in the survey. As this survey has argued throughout, such enormous samples pull scores firmly toward the sensible middle, as the sheer variety of thousands upon thousands of visitors – tourists, MPs, office workers, drinkers from every corner of the world – averages out. A 4.2 across five thousand people is the honest mean of a vast and varied multitude, a mark of a hugely popular, busy, landmark pub rather than any fault. The Prat’s statistics desk files it as a classic large-sample landmark score: the Albert is a genuine destination, drawing thousands, and its solid 4.2 reflects the honest verdict of an enormous crowd. The Prat’s heritage desk adds: for a Victorian survivor of such splendour, drawing such multitudes, a steady 4.2 is a thoroughly honourable result.
The pub
A 4.2 across five thousand one hundred and sixty-one people is a solid, volume-influenced score on a vast sample. The reviews describe a magnificent, historic, characterful Victorian pub with splendid decor, good food and drink, and genuine grandeur – a beloved landmark and living museum of the gin-palace age.
Verdict
A magnificent, historic Victorian pub named the Albert, after the Prince Consort – a splendid gin-palace survivor standing gloriously intact amid the modern towers of Westminster, complete with a division bell to summon MPs back to vote.
Go, have a pint at the Albert, admire the Victorian splendour that outlasted the Blitz and the bulldozers, and listen for the division bell – the ring that might send a Member of Parliament sprinting from his beer to the Commons, in a pub named for the Queen’s own beloved consort.
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]
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