August 7 2026 - 10:00am
I was late to pubs. I went to discos when I was underage, to sweaty basements to see punk bands when I was an older teenager, and to the Groucho Club in my twenties. Pubs were something my parents did; their Bristol local, amusingly, was called The Good Intent — what the road to Hell is said to be paved with.
But my third husband, who I moved to Brighton in 1995 to chase, was keen on pubs, so I gave them a whirl and found I liked them very much indeed. I particularly liked the feeling of walking up to the bar and asking — very politely — for what I wanted, as I’m something of a fidget and never keen on waiting around for someone to take my order.
Now, however, Westminster Council is reportedly pushing for pubs in Soho to ban ordering at the bar, as well as what it refers to as “vertical drinking”. I won’t be doing any “vertical drinking” on account of being in a wheelchair, but it’s still a sign that the world has gone gaga and that pubs are at the center of these efforts. The culprits are, once again, those wet blankets, often to be found on councils, who attempt to extract the fun out of everything.
Just look at the attempts to ban smoking in pub gardens a couple of years ago, before backtracking following pushback from the hospitality industry. Then there’s the update of the Employment Rights Bill to make employers liable for staff being offended by customers. And we wonder why two pubs a day are closing.
The “public house” was invented because the homes of the poor were often cold and inhospitable; there is something poignant in their very name, like the public baths which came about because most people had no access to bathing facilities. These are strange days indeed when I find myself agreeing with Sadiq Khan, who has spoken against “restrictive and anti-growth policies”. This particular policy says pubs should “discourage excessive drunkenness and encourage the provision of more seating in premises that serve alcohol for people to sit and enjoy a drink and order food by table service in place of open bar space that caters for high volume vertical drinking”.
Speaking to the Guardian, the licensing lawyer Philip Colvin KC summed it up well: “Vertical drinking is social drinking, allowing people to mix and socialize as they wish. So this is asking the traditional pub not to behave as a traditional pub and to ask people to stay with the group they came with. One could characterize this as being contrary to the ethos of pubs as places which promote community cohesion.”
You’d think that something calling itself “The Soho Society” — whose very neighborhood name derived from a hunting cry in the 17th century, became a thriving music hall quarter in the 19th century, and has been a hub of naughty nightlife ever since — wouldn’t be a killjoy. Yet that very society has voted in its AGM to challenge new applications for bars or restaurants in the area and to object to any existing venue wishing to open beyond midnight.
The Society has form for this kind of behavior. In 2020, it objected to a restaurant retracting windows in the summertime because of possible chatter from over-excited diners. It’s laughable that a group whose goal is to “preserve the character of Soho” is seeking to stamp out unruly watering holes — because the sedate version of Soho these people think they’re protecting has never actually existed.
I blame lockdown, when those namby-pamby bed-wetters the HSPs (Highly Sensitive People) came to the fore, fetishizing isolation and revelling in having things brought to them by silent muzzled servants, returned to the pre-birth state of safety like tiny madmen in their padded cells. But we shouldn’t be pandering to these oddities: we are atomized enough. Westminster Council may be full of good intentions, but it should remember where that often leads.
