Desire has left the apps and gone to the boozer. A dispatch on how London's pubs have become the city's theatres of desire.
Thursday, seven o’clock, Hackney. The Spurstowe Arms by London Fields is already wedged.
Pints of Guinness settle in neat little parliaments; the glasswasher’s cycle ticks like a metronome. A bartender chalks a menu – FROZEN MARGARITAS £10 – TOMATO ANCHOVY PIZZA £16 HOT HONEY + £1 – 2 HOUR WAIT – and hangs it above a pile of lime wedges sweating in a plastic tray. Car Seat Headrest’s It’s Only Sex is playing, though you’d be hard-pressed to hear it over the mustachioed man in a suede jacket at the far end of the bar who is currently declaring that the Gallagher brothers’ recently buried hatchet ‘could yet rescue the nation.’
But I haven’t come to the Spurstowe for his Britpop promulgation, or the pizza with its one-quid hot-honey drizzle, or even for the Guinness, however reputable the pour. No. What I’ve come for is harder to admit but easy enough to see: the hope that crossing two postcodes – sometimes 40 minutes on the Overground, sometimes a trudge across town in the rain – might yield a number, a kiss… perhaps something more. It’s astonishing what distances we’ll endure for the vague prospect of romance – miles we’d hesitate to cross for birthdays, housewarmings, or the slow death of friendship.
Recently, London’s other theatres of desire have lost their glamour, their scripts stale and spotlights unforgiving. Clubs have become overpriced, strobe-lit school discos; dating apps have reduced courtship to a form-filling exercise, each prompt triter than the last. Even respectable hobbies – running, ceramics, sea swimming – have been conscripted into shyer yet sluttier forms of speed-dating.
The pub, by contrast, still trades in plausible deniability: the illusion that you’re only here for a drink, not for the hunt. Unlike clubs or apps, you can insist that you stumbled into intimacy by accident. The whole institution is built on this social sleight of hand – an insistence that you’re ‘not looking,’ even when you very much are. A pint is no longer just a straightforward route to drunkenness; it’s a prop, an alibi, the minimum ticket price for standing in a heaving, sticky room where something – or, rather, someone – might happen. And that possibility is all the more charged because, by design, pubs are conservative social spaces. You’re meant to keep to your friends, stick to your drink, avoid strangers’ eyes. The codes don’t encourage mingling – yet many still go half-hoping for a break in them.
This is what the pub has become for a certain kind of Londoner: not the sticky-carpeted local of yore with their tea-towel-swabbed pint glasses and flickering slot machines in the corner, but a chosen local. One that offers you the chance of a kiss, a number exchanged, or, at the very least, a love story so good it becomes pub lore.
‘Me? I wouldn’t say I’m quote-unquote looking for love, if that’s what you’re after,’ says Tom, a ridiculously tall 30-something musician with a plastic cup of lager at Peckham Arches, the beer garden under the Overground tracks. ‘But I guess I do keep showing up. Because something might happen. Could meet the love of my life. Or, more accurate, actually – someone else who I’d be delighted to let ruin it.’ He pauses. ‘But if it doesn’t, or I don’t… at least the pints are cheap. And I don’t mind the long tube back to Canonbury – I do my best thinking on the Windrush.’ He says this like it’s nothing, but Canonbury to Peckham is 40 minutes on the Tube – a serious commitment for a man who swears he isn’t ‘looking for love.’ Indifference doesn’t usually travel that far south.
Later that week, outside the Prince George in Dalston, Talia, a 28-year-old production assistant, holds a cigarette she doesn’t seem especially committed to smoking. She and her friend Caoimhe, 29, a digital marketing executive, tell me they’d deleted all dating apps (‘both Hinge and Raya’) last month.
‘Now we just come here instead,’ Talia says. ‘Same odds, fewer opportunities to have our heads done in. We’ve gotten luckiest standing at this very spot, actually.’
Caoimhe nods enthusiastically before cutting in: ‘And everyone knows the smoker’s section is where the hotties live!’
When I ask how they’ve ‘gotten lucky,’ she waggles her eyebrows. ‘Well, Tal’s met a few loves of her night here, if you know what I mean.’
Talia swats her arm. ‘Ah, Cweave! Behave! You knew that one fella from school and introduced me!’ She takes another pained drag of her cigarette and Caoimhe cranes her neck, scanning the pavement. Then she turns back to me: ‘I’m trying to find a smoking hottie for you right now, because you should never let yourself shag anyone from those fucking apps again.’
These kinds of little disavowals have become the shared patter of London’s pubgoers. Nobody wants to confess they’re lonely, looking for love, or on the pull – far too vulnerable – so they deliver lines about ‘hotties,’ ‘loves of the night,’ and lovers who’ll ruin their life, letting the scene play out. And each pub, it seems, offers a stage on which to perform it.
At The Pelican, every night opens with the same act: a chance encounter, a love-at-second-sighting, a dress rehearsal for romance. Instead of tickets, the Notting Hill pub sells the promise of a first date by the pint. Strangers flirt on a Thursday, then return the next week under the guise of a budding romance forged in its oak-panelled rooms. (And of course they do: the place glows with candlelight – flattering, forgiving – and the wine list is just long enough to keep you lingering ‘til close.)
‘This is the only place I’d risk a first date,’ one woman called Flossy tells me, ‘because you don’t ever have to call it a date. Usually I’ve already met the guys I’ve been out with here – we meet, we chat, they ask for my number, and a week later we’re back in the same spot pretending it’s something new. You’re practically forced into dating someone here, if you come enough.’
At the next table, I ask a man in an Oxford shirt if he and the woman beside him are on a date, or if they’ve just met tonight at The Pelican. He shakes his head: they’re ‘just old mates from uni.’ When he ducks to the loo, she leans over to clarify. ‘We are old mates,’ she says. ‘But we hadn’t spoken in yonks until we bumped into each other last week – here, at the Peli.’ Were they on a date? She pauses and plucks an olive from the garnish of her martini, before admitting they’ll ‘probably shag later.’ Not out of romance, or even nostalgia, but precedent: ‘I mean, we did it once, in, like, Val Thorens or something our first year.’ That’s The Pelican’s specialty: turning coincidence into courtship – and, naturally, calling it anything but a date.
Across town, The Faltering Fullback in Finsbury Park doesn’t bother with candlelight or wine lists – it’s built serendipity into its very bones, the pub’s stacked wooden decks and switchback staircases the perfect stage for strangers to get lost, bump bodies, and exchange numbers. ‘It’s the only place where getting lost gets you flirting,’ says Lucas, a civil servant in his thirties. His friend Frank rolls his eyes. ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s only saying that because he bumped into the same fit girl three times, and she finally gave him her number.’
If The Pelican and The Faltering Fullback force people together, The Gowlett Arms in Peckham turns it into a spectacle and insists you watch. Recognition is the currency here: posh boys pretending not to be posh, many of them actors half-flirting, half-auditioning, expecting to be remembered.
‘I wouldn’t really call myself an actor,’ says a shaggy-haired actor I know named Milo, 29, swirling the dregs of his pint like it’s whiskey. ‘I mean, yeah, I’ve done a few things, but right now I’m mostly storytelling. Well, you know… writing.’ He lets the word hang, unfinished but heavy, leading me to wonder if he means a script, a novel or – most likely – a Substack essay no one asked for. Desire becomes dramaturgy here: everyone waiting to be cast, pint as prop, hoping their monologue lands.
The Old Queen’s Head in Islington, by contrast, runs on denial-as-folklore. Paul Mescal’s brief patronage during his run as Stanley Kowalski at the Almeida Theatre has become almost mythic: everyone swears they smoked with him, drank with him, or shagged him – albeit no two versions ever match. Though Streetcar wrapped years ago, nobody admits they still go in the hopes of finding their own Paul; even so, that spirit lingers. ‘Oh, we’re not together,’ says a couple sharing both a chair and a packet of Scampi Fries. ‘We’ve quite literally just met tonight, but we’re… nostalgically compatible. We’ve definitely met in a past life.’
Around the corner, Godet – technically a wine bar – caters to people pretending they’re over it. ‘We’d stay out if we could meet someone, but we’ll probably be pushing off soon,’ one pair of friends tell me immediately after ordering their second bottle of wine. ‘Everyone’s always on the hunt, but somehow never shooting their shot.’
The crowd at The Toucan in Soho is somehow even blunter, though far less cynical. The evening I went, it was a Guinness bunker packed with bawdy Americans in rugby shirts. ‘Easiest place in London to get laid!’ bellowed a graduate student from Chicago – his friends referred to him as ‘Beef’ – shouting to be heard over the synth beats of Supertramp’s Goodbye Stranger. Minutes later, I saw him kissing a woman who may or may not have been from London. Whether he managed to get laid, I’ll never know.
Of course, Londoners aren’t really expecting to find the love of their life at The Faltering Fullback, or even someone worth a first date at The Pelican. Nobody wants to admit they’re at the pub to pull. But, in a city like London – atomised, unaffordable, permanently mediated by dating apps that treat intimacy like admin – the pub is the last working theatre of desire. There is no strategy, only performance. Everyone takes up their role, searching the room with thousand-yard stares, waiting for a cue that rarely comes.
Yet still, week after week, the cast of London’s horniest, most lovelorn pubgoers return – pints in hand, parts half-learned – rehearsing for the night when it finally might.
