I have a memory of one near the Albert Hall at that time, and one near Waterloo, maybe in The Cut. It makes sense in an area with a lot of passing trade to have some kind of signal like that to pull in the passing trade. I think you're only noticing it because the head designer at Robbies has suddenly become a convert - it's no coincidence that the first two you cite are both Robbies.īut it goes back much further than that - my addled brain wants to say that 10-15 years ago, a grey exterior was already an established (if not universal) "code" in central London for maybe not quite a true gastropub, but at the very least an aspirational drinking with decent food pub, that middle-class out-of-towners and tourists could feel safe in. But it seems that the current fashion is for pubs to be edgy rather than cosy. To my mind at least, if a pub is decorated and furnished in cold pastels rather than warm browns, creams and reds it does detract from the experience. But this trend has extended to interiors too, and in fact predated its application to external walls. On its own, it makes no difference to the customer inside the pub. Of course, it’s only a coat of paint on the exterior, and it can easily be removed in the next refurbishment. But are there certain influencers of taste in the pub world from which the wider population refreshing the decor of their pubs take their cue? We now look back aghast that people ever wore such things as platform soles. People can sometimes come up with post-facto rationalisations, such as claiming that doing away with beermats makes tables easier to clean, but that isn’t the real reason.Īs pubs are owned by a whole host of businesses of varying sizes, these trends cannot be blamed on a single controlling mind, and instead seem to spread organically in the same way that fashions in clothing do. And nobody can ever satisfactorily explain why. A while back, although it seems to have passed now, there was a vogue for installing shelves of dusty old books that nobody would ever read.
Examples include posing tables, scatter cushions, getting rid of beermats, dispensing with zeros in menu prices, and replacing carpet with bare wood flooring.
There are numerous fads that seem to spread across pubs over the years where it is hard to understand the rationale. But if pubs are to be plastered, then surely they are much more welcoming if it is done in white or cream, or in the pinks and pale blues that are often seen in the West Country and East Anglia. A few years ago, there was a fashion to remove whitewash and return pubs to their natural brickwork, which can be seen, for example, at the Old Blue Bell in Preston. I would be genuinely interested to hear someone explain the thinking behind this, because to my mind deliberately painting pubs in a cold, drab shade only serves to make them less appealing. This preference for would-be classy neutralness mirrors recent trends in home décor sometimes referred to disparagingly as ‘the grey plague’.īut if this is the case why has it been applied to the unapologetically downmarket Jolly Crofter just a couple of hundred yards away from the Armoury, where nobody of a vaguely aspirational bent would ever cross the threshold? Our assumption is that this is about trying to attract a newer, more aspirational crowd – or, at least, not to put them off. Boak and Bailey wrote about Why are all the pubs going grey? earlier this year. Something similar has happened to the Armoury which we visited later on in the day, where two shades of cream have been replaced by two shades of grey.Īnd these aren’t just two isolated examples – up and down the country, the past few years have seen an ever-growing number of pubs cast off their old guise to adopt a new grey uniform. To my eye it looked much better in the previous more clearly defined black and white. On our recent day out in Stockport, someone commented that they weren’t too enamoured of the recent grey makeover applied to the Swan With Two Necks, and I couldn’t disagree.