A Bermondsey karaoke bar flying a name of warm nostalgia – the old school yard, the playground of childhood, where the games and the friendships began
The Old School Yard carries a 4.2 across more than seven hundred reviews and trades as a karaoke bar near London Bridge. It flies a name of warm, universal nostalgia, and the Prat’s naming desk was carried straight back to the playground.
Towards Bermondsey and London Bridge
The Old School Yard sits near London Bridge and Bermondsey, on the south-bank side, serving the district’s crowds. Proper Bermondsey-and-Southwark territory, no disclaimer needed.
The playground of memory
The school yard is one of the most universally nostalgic places in the human memory – the playground where we all spent our childhoods, the scene of the games and the friendships, the conkers and the skipping ropes, the first fallings-out and the first alliances. Everyone has an old school yard somewhere in their past, and the phrase summons it instantly: the bell, the break-time, the tribe of children let loose to play. It is a name soaked in warm, shared, back-to-childhood nostalgia – a clever thing to hang over a place of grown-up play.
Grown-ups let out to play
The Prat’s favourite reading is the grown-up playground. A karaoke bar is, at heart, a place where adults are let loose to play – to be silly, to sing badly and gloriously, to drop the dignity of the working day and mess about like children again. To call it the Old School Yard is a lovely, knowing joke: the bar as the playground for grown-ups, the karaoke stage as the place where the buttoned-up adult is released back into playful, uninhibited childhood. It captures exactly the spirit of a good karaoke night – the joyful, unselfconscious play we thought we left behind in the yard.
The “old school” wink
There is a second, cheeky reading in “old school.” To be “old school” is to be traditional, classic, of the good old-fashioned kind – and the phrase winks at a certain nostalgia for the way things were, the classic tunes, the old favourites belted out at the karaoke mic. An “Old School Yard” promises both the playground of childhood and the “old school” classics of the singalong – a double dose of nostalgia, wrapped in a single warm name. The 4.2 across seven hundred reviews suggests plenty come to play.
The Prat’s naming desk lingers on the gentle genius of the pairing. Karaoke, at its heart, is an act of fearless play – it asks the grown adult to stand up, take a microphone, and sing without any pretence of being good at it, exactly as a child sings in the yard with no thought of judgement. The old school yard was the last place most of us played so freely, before the self-consciousness of adulthood set in. To name the karaoke bar after it is to invite that freedom back – to promise a room where, for one glorious evening, you may be as unselfconscious, as loud and as happily foolish as you were at seven. Few names capture the true spirit of the karaoke night so neatly.
Verdict
A 4.2 across seven hundred-plus reviews is a solid score, and the Old School Yard earns it on a warm, nostalgic, playful name. It flies the old school yard – the playground of everyone’s childhood – as the perfect emblem for a karaoke bar, where grown-ups are let out to play, sing badly, and be joyfully, unselfconsciously young again.
Go for the karaoke and the back-to-childhood nostalgia, and let yourself out to play in the Old School Yard. The playground was where we all learned to mess about for the sheer joy of it – and a good karaoke night is simply that lesson, happily relearned.
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 London is it’s been satirized so thoroughly for so long that reality finally just gave up and started imitating the satire.
My therapist said I use humor as a defense mechanism. I showed her this and she said “yes, continue that, it’s working.”