The Joiners Arms, Lewisham - strangely familiar
We often talk about a pub's atmosphere when we're inside having a pint. But what can we tell from its exterior?
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It gave me the feeling I’ve bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of. That’s the way we’re going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over, mock-turtles grazing under the neutral fruit-trees - Coming up for Air, George Orwell
Note: For the purpose of this article I’m talking about Lewisham, the principal area within the borough, not the entire borough. The London borough contains many excellent, varied pubs from the Shirker’s micropub in New Cross - which I wrote about this week for Pellicle, to the Dog and Bell in Deptford via Chandos in Honor Oak Park and the Dacre Arms near Blackheath.
For those of you who keenly follow my every move on Twitter - who doesn’t? - you may have noticed that every weekday (unless I forget) I post a photo of a London pub I have taken on my phone.
On Twitter, I provide ALT text of the pub’s name and location. That’s it. Although there’s plenty of times I want to use my Nikon camera and tripod but I’ve restricted myself - admittedly I once cracked and used Lightroom, while I’ve indiscriminately added filters out of a vain desire to impress on social media.
I haven’t told people what I’m doing - as I’m not entirely sure myself - but it stops me endlessly posting promotion or criticism on social media and forces me to get outside to walk to a pub. It feels like we all need a timeline cleanse now and then.
The casual project also has the feel of one started by Andy Grumbridge (AKA the Dulwich Raider and one of the owners of the Shirker’s) who walked to a different pub each day in the first lockdown and took a photo. But unlike Andy I haven’t set any rules on numbers I can take in a day and I use public transport etc. I also have posted shuttered pubs, moving in on Dead London Pubs territory, slightly. (There’s a lot of accounts that take photos of pubs).
The idea started after I walked past the Joiners Arms in Lewisham and I could see how the composition reminded me of the work of photographer Peter Mitchell, whose Strangely Familiar shots I often gaze at on Instagram. Before I knew it the photos were acting as a memory bank for ideas that I could return to write about and today I look back at the Joiners.
The above photo of the Joiners has a strangely timeless feel. There’s a hint of urban decay and the setting is unnerving but intimate: what I saw you now see. Despite being a busy thoroughfare it feels voyeuristic.
You feel like you can gauge the atmosphere of the pub from its exterior but this also isn’t necessarily a positive emotion and is more like a snap judgement. What do you think when you see a mobility scooter, Sky Sports advertised and a huge tower block behind a pub? For some - and if I’m being truthful, this includes me - this could be easily imagined to be a hostile environment.
This is, to put it plainly, a prejudice as it’s based on profiling and a smidgen of snobbery. It’s also a reaction based on some experience and a withdrawal from similar spaces.
But this is a prejudice I felt like I exercised (and then exorcised) when putting my book together travelling up and down the country visiting desi pubs that weren’t in familiar areas and had exteriors that weren’t designed to welcome strangers. Because of licensing laws and the need for safe spaces, some of the first desi spaces were on a need-to-know basis.
I think of the Boulevard in North London, which had blacked out windows in a dimly lit street. When I opened the door it felt like when Dorothy got to the land of Oz and was whisked into a glorious Technicolor landscape. The black and white snap judgement gave way to something more mellow, nuanced and shaded.
But the exterior atmosphere of the Joiners, is a great example of how an observer can be easily coloured by prejudice. When I speak to people about Lewisham I have in the past described it as a pub desert despite it having numerous choices like the Joiners, and a Wetherspoons at the opposite end of the high street. What I’m saying is it’s a no-go zone for someone wanting a craft option, a safe middle-class space or a “gastropub”.
The nearest to this category was Sutton’s Radio on the high street which was run by Antic but never reopened after the first lockdown. Retro stylings. Dim lighting. Indifferent staff. From the exterior atmosphere, you may have guessed this would’ve been the experience, but it still offered respite from the intense damp gloom of the pavement where people fought for buses and market detritus mixed in with chicken shop discards.
Therefore, it’s easy to say Lewisham is bereft of drinking options but to some the Joiners defies this as well as acting as a portal to another time. To an era when the indoor shopping centre (a mall you might say) was thriving and had a pedestrian walkway to where the police station now sits.
Many commented on my Joiners photo about this - and some see the Joiners as the link to a past that is romanticised and drained of multiculturalism. This photo could easily become part of the genre of poorly disguised racist shitposting.
Lewisham has suffered from poor planning, lack of investment and inadequate transport links to outer suburbs - I often have to get the always cramped P4 bus which trundles from Lewisham to Brixton via plush Dulwich. Some white people who have taken flight view the decay as a problem caused by multiculturalism, and by doing so heap racism on racism.
But the Joiners is still there and my photo is neither a paean to a rose-tinted bygone era nor is it a statement of multicultural modernism.
Because an out-of-context single image of an exterior of a pub can be twisted in so many ways - and even a photo taken in 2023 can hark back to a non-existent time when Lewisham and other parts of south London were “white”. It’s not intended to judge Lewisham positively or negatively, it’s just a snapshot.
And I’ve never been inside the Joiners because the exterior stirs so many feelings inside me that I don’t want the image blurred. It’s fixed in time and etched into my psyche. Strangely familiar.
Tomorrow I will be at Siren Tap Room:
