Support your local pub before it too is reduced to a skeletal reminder of what once was
A look at defunct boozers highlights the dangers that could await many others
Newcomers to London can and should be forgiven for losing themselves in its tallest feats of architecture.
It’s easy to be impressed when confronted with the eyesore that is the Shard and natural to marvel at the Gherkin.
These towering structures have redefined the capital’s skyline in recent years and, whatever one thinks of them, are a permanent reminder of physical gains.
When staring in wonder at that which we have gained, it’s easy to miss what has been lost.
Walking open-mouthed through city streets with your neck stretched back means you can’t see changes on the ground.
One man who has noticed one loss in particular is my good friend, Sun journalist Alex Matthews.
Alex has become fascinated with defunct pubs, whose boarded-up windows uncomfortably contrast with their past lives as communal, welcoming places.
He started taking pictures of these derelict buildings, before researching their histories and posting them on his Time Gentlemen Please Instagram account.
His posts are paradoxical profiles in that they possess the rousing comfort of nostalgia but are inextricable from a kind of grief at what was was and is no longer.
Alex focuses his lens specifically on South London boozers and I recently caught up with him to speak about why he took on this project.
He said: “I started this Instagram account because I was walking around my local community in Deptford and noticing so many buildings that still had those unmistakable characteristics – grand facades, ornate markings above doors and windows or even names still marked out years later.
“I felt compelled to document them and find out each pub’s story. Every single building has a fascinating tale.”
Scrolling through Time Gentlemen Please is akin to surveying the wreckage of a once-impressive ship. You see beauty, but it’s a morbid beauty, one that cannot be restored.
These buildings are like corpses - you see the face, you remember important occasions, but you know that the thing in front of you can create no more memories.
For Alex, these closures are not simply a concern because they lessen the options in which he can drink.
He fears that patrons are being pushed to the ugly margins of society, those margins it’s hard for many of us to truly care about.
“Seeing them in their current state always makes me sad – especially when they were at the end of residential streets or tucked away under railway bridges.
“These places used to serve a purpose, they gave working class, normal people somewhere to drink and socialise and enjoy themselves.
“There used to be at least 12 pubs on Deptford high street alone – now there are barely two.
“The other day I was walking through Deptford – a stone’s throw from where two pubs used to be before they were transformed into betting shops – and I saw an old man leave his pals on a bench to take a piss behind an electricity mains box.
“He then stumbled back to his pals all of whom were clasping cans of super-strength lager.
“I thought to myself ‘fucking hell that’s grim’. A week or so later I was researching a pub that had been closed down on the same row of shops – I suddenly felt a pang of guilt for judging him.”
If these men were indeed patrons of one of yesteryear’s pubs, then that group so easily viewed as anti-social yobs could actually be cultural outcasts, clinging onto the memory of what was. If this is the case, then London has essentially created its own problem.
“Pubs are really important to me,” Alex continued. “I feel like they’re an institution that society regards with snobbery and indifference these days. It’s like we’re prepared to say ‘they’ve had their day time to let them die’. I just find that whole outlook so depressing.”
Time Gentlemen Please really is worth a follow. It is a compact reminder of a problem that needs to be addressed in England.
We must ask ourselves, if indeed we do care about our culture, whether we want to see one of our most treasured institutions continue to plummet toward extinction.
Four-hundred boozers closed in England and Wales last year alone, each one of them taking with it something precious to hundreds of punters.
You can follow Time Gentlemen Please here. Once you’ve pushed that button, get out and support your local pub.