Alleged Gen X and Gen Z snowflakes might not be so bad after all, as it turns out they all love an ‘old man’ boozer.
The pub industry is facing a brutal closure crisis with 239 having shut their doors in the year to March 31. Much of the blame has focused on a new generation of post-Covid adults, accused of having no regard for the welfare of the nation’s beloved pub and beer industries, and instead trying to do morally bankrupt things like save cash and look after their health.
But a stroll around London paints a different story. In the capital, many of the pubs you might think would be next on the chopping block are teeming with noise, atmosphere and young, trendy folk.
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The phenomenon has been gaining momentum in recent years, with many a young Londoner now well-versed in the city’s finest old man pubs, complete with sticky floors, elderly regulars and quirky, against-the-grain resilience.
(Image: thebluepostssoho/Instagram)
One such pub has been at the epicentre of this wave of new love for old boozers – Soho’s Blue Posts on Berwick Street Market.
“We noticed a trend for the old man pubs, even social clubs have become trendy. It’s just exploded,” says its landlord Martin Ashley. “The older generation like it, the tourists like it and now these youngsters have jumped onto it.”
The pub really is a relic, a totem to an age gone by, complete with a cigarette machine, a jukebox, and a thick old carpet with years of stories stomped in.
“It’s just got so much history and heritage to it – it’s just different from all the others that have been polished up and modernised.”
Martin took the free house over mid-way through the second lockdown, a risky time to be going into the hospitality industry. But it had been his local beforehand and he’d been trying to get his hands on the keys to it for about 12 years.
He has run a number of pubs before the Blue Posts but came to a realisation that you don’t need to blindly modernise boozers when moving into them. “All of a sudden we were like, you don’t have to do this [modernisation] apart from the basics [like] toilets, cellar.”
(Image: PA)
The Blue Posts has shot to fame through a pair of particularly viral incidents that were seen by millions of young eyes.
One was hosting a collaboration between skateboarding brand Palace and the UK’s most popular beer, Stella. The outcome was an evening of Palace Artois, a perfect storm of hugely desirable streetwear coupled with an everyman lager brand. The outcome was most young Londoners’ Instagram feeds being bunged up with content for days.
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“That was huge for us, we knew it was going to be big, but we didn’t realise it was going to go global. Then it went on TikTok. We were the most talked about venue in the whole of the UK at one point, which is insane for our old beaten-up boozer.”
The next incident came in the form of a viral TikTok when content creator Max Lepage-Keefe published a highly controversial clip of him and his mates having a beer out the front on the pavement.
Dressed in fashionable clothes, the young moustachios chat and laugh as if the camera isn’t there, while overlaid text reads: “Pints, chit chat and good people”. It enthralled the masses, some thought it was cool, others the worst thing they’d ever seen.
Like it or loath it, it doesn’t matter, it served only to propel the old man boozer deeper into the psyche of Gens X and Z.
(Image: thebluepostssoho/Instagram)
“What I noticed literally overnight was the crowd [became] really young, you know 18, 19, from nowhere… it was really young, sort of under 20s.”
That uber-young crowd has faded away now, but the pub still remains a favourite with the under-35s. “We’ve still got the old-timers during the day, then we’ve got the people from after work and then in the evening, we’ve got all that fashion and media lot and at the weekend.”
But where has this unlikely love affair come from? Martin reckons he’s got the answer.
“It’s fashionable, that whole 80s, 90s vibe. A lot of the music and fashions they’re listening to [and wearing] were about before they were born, so they’ve tapped into that, that nostalgic, retro look… it’s cooler to be seen there than in some swanky nightclub or cocktail bar.”
It’s not all good news though, Martin says some of the old regulars have been struggling to get in. “Some of the die-hard locals are drinking somewhere else and I say ‘Man, I haven’t seen you for ages’ and they say ‘I can’t get in anymore.’ It’s gone from their local boozer to something bigger. They can get in during the day, and we do try and make a big fuss of them while we are here.”