A 4.4 bar named the Chapel, part of the long tradition of borrowing sacred words for places of thoroughly secular pleasure
The Chapel Bar holds a 4.4 from five hundred and thirty-three people, and carries a name borrowed from the language of worship – “the Chapel,” a sacred word applied, in the great tradition of playful irreverence, to a place of thoroughly secular pleasure.
The chapel
A chapel is a place of Christian worship – smaller and more intimate than a church, whether a private chapel in a great house, a side-chapel within a cathedral, or the independent chapel of the Nonconformist denominations, the Methodists and Baptists and others who worshipped outside the Church of England. The word carries connotations of intimacy, devotion, and quiet sacredness – a small, holy space set apart for prayer.
To name a bar “the Chapel” is to play, knowingly, on the gap between the sacred and the profane. It borrows the reverent, devotional language of worship for a place devoted instead to drink and pleasure – a small, gently blasphemous joke of the kind that names abound in. The Prat’s naming desk has tracked this instinct throughout both surveys: the persistent, cheerful habit of dressing the temple of drink in the robes of the temple of worship.
The pub as congregation
There is, beneath the joke, a real and rather profound parallel, which this survey has noted before. The pub and the place of worship have always been the twin poles of the English community – the church and the pub, the two buildings where a village gathered, the sacred and the social hearts of the parish. Both are places of communion, in different senses; both bring people together in shared ritual; both offer belonging, comfort, and a refuge from the solitary struggle of life.
The regulars of a good pub are, in their way, a congregation – a community gathered faithfully in a shared space, with their rituals and their fellowship. So calling a bar “the Chapel” is not merely a cheeky borrowing; it points to a genuine kinship between the two great gathering-places, the one offering spiritual communion and the other the more earthly kind. The Prat’s philosophy desk notes that the bar and the chapel are perhaps not so far apart as the pious might think – both are answers to the human need to gather, belong, and be lifted, however briefly, out of ourselves.
The possible conversion
Many a bar named the Chapel occupies a genuinely converted place of worship – a real former chapel, its pews and pulpit replaced by a bar, its sacred architecture repurposed for pleasure. Whether or not this Chapel Bar is such a conversion, the name evokes the possibility, and there is a real trend of former churches and chapels, made redundant by declining congregations, being reborn as bars, restaurants, and clubs – the sacred spaces of one age becoming the social spaces of the next.
The bar
A 4.4 across five hundred and thirty-three people is a solid, real-sample score. The reviews describe a good, characterful bar doing an honest trade – a decent house of the more earthly kind of communion, under a sacred name.
Verdict
A good bar named the Chapel, borrowing the sacred language of worship for a place of secular pleasure, and pointing, beneath the joke, to the genuine kinship between the two great gathering-places of the English community.
Go, join the congregation of the more earthly kind, and enjoy a bar named after the chapel – for the pub and the place of worship have always been the twin hearts of the parish, and both answer the same human need to gather and belong.
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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