A 4.6 bar devoted to gin, the spirit that once caused a national catastrophe and is now the height of craft respectability
The Gin Bar holds a 4.6 from forty-eight people, and devotes itself entirely to gin – the spirit that is now the height of craft-distilled respectability, and that once caused one of the greatest social catastrophes in English history.
The Gin Craze
It is easy to forget, amid the current craze for artisanal gin with botanical garnishes, that gin was once a genuine national disaster. In the early eighteenth century, cheap gin flooded London, and the result was the Gin Craze – a period of mass alcoholism so severe that it threatened the social fabric of the city.
Gin was cheap, strong, and everywhere, and the poor of London drank themselves to death on it in staggering numbers. The phrase advertised over the gin shops – “drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, clean straw for nothing” – captures the horror: for a penny you could get drunk, for twopence insensible, and the straw was to sleep it off. The birth rate fell, the death rate soared, and the government passed a series of Gin Acts trying desperately to bring it under control.
Hogarth’s Gin Lane
The catastrophe produced one of the most famous images in British art: William Hogarth’s engraving Gin Lane, from 1751. It is a nightmarish vision of a city destroyed by gin – the central figure a drunken mother, oblivious, letting her baby fall to its death; ruin, madness, and death in every corner; the pawnbroker and the undertaker the only thriving businesses.
Hogarth paired it with Beer Street, a cheerful scene of health and prosperity, to make his point: beer, the honest English drink, was wholesome, while gin, the foreign spirit, was poison. It was propaganda, and effective propaganda, and it helped turn public opinion against the gin epidemic. The Prat’s history desk notes that a bar cheerfully devoted to gin sits at the happy end of a very dark story – the same spirit that Hogarth depicted killing London is now sold with elderflower and a slice of cucumber.
The gin redemption
The rehabilitation of gin is one of the great drinks stories of recent decades. From national poison, gin has become the craft spirit par excellence – hundreds of small distilleries producing botanically complex, carefully-made gins, served in balloon glasses with elaborate garnishes, the very height of middle-class respectability. The spirit that destroyed the Georgian poor is now the drink of the dinner party and the craft cocktail bar.
A bar devoted entirely to gin is celebrating this redemption – offering the huge modern range of artisanal gins, each with its own botanical signature, in a setting as far from Gin Lane as it is possible to imagine.
The bar
At forty-eight reviews this is a small-sample venue, so the usual caution applies, but a 4.6 across it is promising. The reviews describe a good selection of gins and well-made drinks – the spirit shown at its refined, modern, redeemed best.
Verdict
A bar devoted to gin, the spirit that once caused the catastrophic Gin Craze and inspired Hogarth’s nightmarish Gin Lane, now redeemed into the height of craft respectability, served with botanicals rather than clean straw.
Go, explore the modern range of a spirit that has travelled from national poison to dinner-party darling, and raise a balloon glass to the long, strange redemption of gin.
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]
