Country life
Bring back the coffee house
Leanda de Lisle
Yesterday I threw away two dustbin bags full of old papers and glued four years' worth of holiday snaps into a photo- graph album. Today I am ready for a new project. The Countryside Alliance has launched a campaign to save the village post office, but I would rather dispose of something and looking around our local villages I believe that something should be the pub.
I know that urban people like the idea of village pubs. As they are willing to pay hun- dreds of thousands of pounds to have a squat little cottage for their weekend retreat, it isn't surprising that their hearts leap at the sight of our ancient taverns with their white-washed walls and black little windows. But they were dives when they were built and they are dives now. I visit them only if I am lost and need directions, or want to go to the loo. It's difficult to know what it is about them that I dislike most, but the decor comes high on the list. Flock and red velvet help make rooms look warm and cosy, but as the rooms in pubs are invariably small and central heat- ed it is a mystery why it is felt necessary to use them. I suppose they add to a pubs an air of ersatz antiquity, making the rooms even dingier than they would otherwise be and acting as a magnet for dust. But they do nothing to help dispel the lingering smell of stale beer, cheap cigarettes and deep fat fryers. Country-pub food is, unfor- tunately, no more attractive than country- pub style. Whether it is stuck in the era of Spam, or has moved on to cabbage salads, it is invariably utterly joyless. The drink, it's true, is fine, if you stick to beer. But if you don't you'll find the white wine is served warm and the tomato juice is thick enough to use as ketchup. All of this could be improved and it's possible to argue that pubs need a revamp, rather than replacement. However, the breweries have tried that. In some cases they changed his- torically interesting names to something fun' like the 'The Frog and Condom', in the hopes of appealing to the young, in others they put highchairs in the dining area to give the place a family ambience. The results are that you get old men in the former, ignoring half-price advocat cock- tails in favour of warm beer, and old cou- ples in the latter, ignoring smiley faced Potato croquettes in favour of shiny slices Of overcooked beef. It clearly takes 70 years of training to be able to make one drink last an hour or two, as you must in these days of strict drink- driving laws. The answer, surely, is to cre- ate a different kind of public house — one where a non-alcoholic drink takes pride of place. The kind of establishment that was popular in 17th- and 18th-century London and are popular in our towns again: coffee houses.
I realise that they are thought to be American and that some may think that if we must have such places we should have tea houses. But all we would end up with then are places filled with yet more old people looking for somewhere to go after their pub lunch.
Besides, as I have said, there need be nothing American about coffee houses. Joseph Addison was praising them in the pages of the first Spectator back in the reign of Queen Anne. He saw them as places where people would come together to have polite conversations about the world. But they also had a reputation as centres of 'the most seditious, indecent and scandalous discourses'. I would like to see village coffee houses providing copies of The Spectator and Country Alliance pam- phlets to provoke debate. For those moments that require a stiff drink, there would be brandy, wine and punch available, as there used to be in the coffee houses of the past.
While village pubs are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, the country coffee house could be the birth place of a new Conser- vatism, providing centres for rural opposi- tion to the current hegemony of New Labour opinion and taste. I look forward to being able to stick a postcard of one in the empty page still left in my photograph album.
Petronella Wyatt's column returns next week.
'My husband's a chaise longue potato.'
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