Move to Metroland!

by Jo Eames

In my carpet-bag of a career, when I’m not buying wine or writing I can often be found staring at a dilapidated pub building, wondering how to bring it back to life. And “life” is the word I want, because pubs are not (or shouldn’t be) just buildings. They are first and foremost characters. When a pub is on song, it contributes a huge amount to a village or town – just like a great local character walking into a party and making it swing.

And because it’s usually been a pub for the whole of living memory, you soon find out when you buy one that it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the locals. Even if they haven’t crossed the threshold and put a penny in the till for fifteen years!

So it’s a responsibility, standing in the car park deciding how to breathe life back into a pub. Not only is the money to do it hard-earned cash and hard-won (incredibly hard-won at the moment) bank funding. If I get the lay-out or the décor wrong, the pub won’t work, no matter how great the beer, food, wine and service.

Some pubs are easy. They’re often beautiful historic buildings, which need no more than “unbuggering up”. Stripping glass, chrome and aluminium fittings out of a 17^th century bar in favour of oak, antique settles and copper jugs couldn’t be more obvious.

But my latest project has taken more thought.  Brookmans was built in 1939 as The Brookmans Park Hotel just south of Hatfield by a local brewery, Hartley’s, which had been refused planning consent for a pure pub, presumably on the grounds that it would lower the tone of the smart new settlement at Brookmans Park. The building is rather grand, neo-Georgian, with arched fanlights, high ceilings, egg and dart cornicing. But it’s been badly hacked about over the years, walls removed, square doors and windows punched through seemingly at random and its last big renovation aiming for a look taken from a Mayfair hotel dining room. Black granite and slate bar, acres of wood veneer, statement wine display, yards of etched glass.

What to do? Well, I’ve always loved old posters – and it struck me that the 1930s were the heyday of travel posters. It was also the Metroland era, when the urban white collar brigade was encouraged to move out of the dirty city along new train and bus lines into clean new garden suburbs. Suburbs like Brookmans Park. It was an optimistic time – until the Depression hit. Which struck a chord, too!

I realised that not only could we take the pub back to its origins, but that large posters would be a great way to decorate four metre high walls. The idea snowballed. I went down to the London Transport Museum, chose a mass of wonderful images to be reproduced. I also persuaded them to let me have some rolls of moquette fabric which they have just had rewoven (in Yorkshire) in the original 1930s patterns to upholster my bar furniture. The beautifully familiar Gills Sans seemed an obvious font for the signage, and the pub’s main colours are Holly Green and Poppy Red, two British Standard colours developed in the Thirties and a classic combination I’ve been noticing ever since I chose them on great British products – think Scrabble, think Evostik!

The builders left on Friday. The furniture is in. Training is underway. The last few finishing touches arrive on Wednesday. We open the doors for the weekend. Will the locals approve?

Watch this space.