A 4.1 pub named The Shakespeare & Platform 22, joining England’s greatest poet to a Victoria Station platform
The Shakespeare and Platform 22 holds a 4.1 from five thousand eight hundred and forty-four people – one of the very largest samples in the entire survey – and carries a name that yokes together two very different worlds: “the Shakespeare,” honouring England’s greatest poet, and “Platform 22,” the prosaic reality of the railway platform at Victoria Station, where this busy pub stands.
The Bard on the sign
“The Shakespeare” honours William Shakespeare – the greatest writer in the English language, the Bard of Avon, the supreme glory of English literature and, arguably, of the entire culture. To name a pub after Shakespeare is to claim a connection, however tenuous, to this towering figure of national and world culture, wrapping the humble drinking house in the mantle of the greatest poet and playwright who ever lived. “The Shakespeare” is a proud, patriotic, and cultural name, and a fairly common one, for the Bard is a figure every Englishman can claim with pride. The Prat’s literary desk notes the grandeur: to name a pub “the Shakespeare” is to reach for the very summit of English culture, the Bard himself presiding over the bar.
Platform 22
And then, yoked to the Bard, comes “Platform 22” – the number of a railway platform at Victoria Station, one of London’s great railway termini, where this pub is located. The contrast is wonderful: the sublime poet and the prosaic platform, the timeless genius of Shakespeare and the workaday reality of the commuter railway, joined in a single name. It captures exactly the pub’s situation – a Shakespeare-named pub attached to, or beside, Platform 22 of the great station – and turns that situation into a knowing, faintly absurd, thoroughly modern name. The Prat’s naming desk enjoys the collision: the immortal Bard and the numbered railway platform, sublime poetry and prosaic transport, joined in cheerful incongruity over a Victoria Station pub.
The great railway station pub
The Shakespeare and Platform 22 belongs to the distinctive and important tradition of the railway station pub – the pub that serves the vast throngs of a great railway terminus, catering to travellers, commuters, and the endless human tide passing through the station. Victoria is one of London’s busiest termini, and a station pub there serves an enormous and varied crowd – the hurried commuter grabbing a pint before the train, the traveller killing time before departure, the reunion and the farewell. This explains the pub’s colossal sample of nearly six thousand reviews – a station pub of this kind serves a truly vast passing multitude. This survey has met the railway’s mark on the pub before, in King’s Cross; the station pub is its purest expression, the drinking house woven directly into the great machine of the railway. The Prat’s social desk notes the setting: the station pub, serving the vast human tide of a great terminus, a fixture of railway life, wedded directly to Platform 22.
The vast sample
The 4.1 from nearly six thousand people is a solid score across one of the very largest samples in the entire survey – matched only by the Albert in this district. As this survey has argued throughout, such colossal samples pull scores firmly toward the sensible middle, as the sheer variety of nearly six thousand hurried, varied, passing travellers averages out completely. A 4.1 across such a multitude is the honest mean of an enormous and transient crowd – the commuters and travellers of a great station, each with their own hurried expectations – and a thoroughly respectable result for a busy station pub serving so vast and varied a throng. The Prat’s statistics desk files it as a classic large-sample station score: the honest verdict of nearly six thousand passing travellers, a solid, dependable result for a pub wedded to one of London’s busiest platforms.
The pub
A 4.1 across five thousand eight hundred and forty-four people is a solid, volume-influenced score on a vast sample. The reviews describe a busy, lively, well-run station pub with decent food and drink and a convenient location – a dependable fixture serving the vast throngs of Victoria Station.
Verdict
A busy, dependable railway station pub named the Shakespeare and Platform 22, joining England’s greatest poet to a Victoria Station platform – sublime Bard and prosaic railway in cheerful incongruity, serving the vast human tide of one of London’s busiest termini.
Go, have a pint at the Shakespeare and Platform 22 before your train, and enjoy the cheerful collision of the name – the immortal Bard and the numbered platform, timeless poetry and workaday railway, joined over a busy station pub serving the endless throngs of Victoria.
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]
This is satire pretending to be documentation or documentation pretending to be satire. The distinction stopped mattering years ago.