Why Standing at the Bar Matters More Than You Think

Britain faced a grave constitutional question on Friday.

Should people in pubs be allowed to stand up?

For generations we had assumed the answer was yes.

Indeed, standing while holding a pint has traditionally occupied a comfortable place alongside apologising when somebody else bumps into you and saying “right then” seventeen minutes before actually leaving.

Then Britain discovered vertical drinking.

Metro captured the national mood rather splendidly with its front-page question:

“Sitting room only at pubs?”

The phrase came from Westminster City Council's draft licensing policy for Soho and the West End, which proposed encouraging more seating and table service rather than premises designed for what it called “high volume vertical drinking.” The intention, the council argued, was to reduce excessive drinking, noise and public nuisance—not literally to confiscate stools from anybody caught upright with a Guinness.

Nonetheless, Britain reacted as Britain does when somebody interferes with pubs.

Politicians objected. Publicans objected. Newspaper columnists objected.

Downing Street declared standing in pubs part of “British life”, while Sadiq Khan criticised the proposed restrictions. By Sunday, Khan had formally asked Westminster to rewrite the draft licensing policy and remove some of its most restrictive provisions.

Which is all very entertaining.

But lurking beneath the jokes about vertical drinking is a surprisingly important question.

What happens when we redesign public life to remove the possibility of bumping into people?

Some of the best human interactions happen because nobody organised them.

Consider the difference between a table and a bar.

At a table, you arrive with three people.

You sit with those three people.

You talk to those three people.

Then one of them calculates that they only had the halloumi starter and therefore owes £23.17 rather than £24.

At a traditional pub bar, the social geometry is different.

You stand beside someone.

Someone squeezes past you.

You ask whether they're waiting to be served.

They say no.

You comment on the football.

They turn out to support the wrong team.

Civilisation somehow survives.

Simon Jenkins made essentially this argument in The Guardian on Friday, defending standing pubs because their looseness permits spontaneous encounters and social mixing that become less likely when everyone is organised into separate seated groups.

The important thing here isn't alcohol.

It is proximity.

Because humans have been accidentally meeting one another in places like this for centuries.

London Has Tried This Experiment Before

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, the coffee house became one of the great institutions of urban life.

People went there to drink coffee, certainly.

But they also went to gossip, argue, read, conduct business and exchange ideas. Coffee houses became meeting places for politics, science and commerce; some acquired the nickname “penny universities” because the price of admission brought access to conversation and information.

The British Museum even preserves a rare late-seventeenth-century drawing of the interior of a London coffee house: a crowded social room rather than a procession of isolated people staring into laptops.

These places mattered partly because people mixed.

Not perfectly, obviously. Georgian London hadn't stumbled upon universal social equality between ordering the coffee and passing the sugar.

But the physical arrangement mattered.

People encountered people they had not specifically arranged to encounter.

Information travelled.

Gossip travelled.

Ideas travelled.

Businesses began.

Arguments happened.

Somebody probably said something idiotic about the government.

London survived.

The pub inherited something of the same function.

It became one of those peculiar spaces that is private property but feels public; intimate without being domestic; populated by strangers without requiring anybody to explain why they are there.

Sociologists later developed the idea of the “third place”: somewhere that is neither home nor work where informal communal life can occur. Pubs are among the classic examples.

And we may be discovering that such places are rather harder to replace than we imagined.

We Have Become Extremely Good at Not Meeting Anybody

Modern life increasingly allows us to remove accidental interaction.

You can order food without speaking to a waiter.

Buy groceries without speaking to a cashier.

Work without speaking to a colleague.

Travel without speaking to another passenger.

Order a pint through an app without speaking to the bar staff.

Date people selected by an algorithm.

Watch television selected by another algorithm.

Then complain that it's increasingly difficult to meet anybody.

This is an impressive piece of social engineering.

We have spent twenty years removing tiny inconveniences from daily life.

Queues.

Small talk.

Waiting.

Asking.

Sharing.

Negotiating.

And many of those changes genuinely are improvements.

Nobody sensible wants to bring back a twenty-minute queue purely because it builds character.

But inconvenience and interaction have sometimes occupied the same space.

Remove every point of friction and you may inadvertently remove some of the places where other people get in.

Even the Guardian recently reported growing interest in phone-free pubs, clubs, book groups and other gatherings designed explicitly to restore face-to-face interaction after years of increasingly screen-mediated social life.

Which makes “vertical drinking” slightly more interesting than it first appears.

Efficiency Isn't Always the Point

A pub with compulsory table service might be more orderly.

So might a railway carriage in which nobody spoke.

So might an office in which everyone stayed permanently at their desks.

So might a city in which nobody loitered, chatted, wandered or stopped unexpectedly.

But human beings are not spreadsheets.

Some things become worse when they become perfectly efficient.

Friendship is inefficient.

Conversation is inefficient.

Falling in love is spectacularly inefficient.

Community may be the accumulated result of thousands of interactions which, viewed individually, accomplish almost nothing.

“How's your mum?”

“Busy today?”

“Did you see that goal?”

“Is anyone sitting there?”

None belongs in a productivity system.

Yet remove enough of them and something begins to disappear.

The great achievement of a good pub, café, park, library, station concourse or neighbourhood shop isn't simply what it sells.

It is whom it allows us to encounter.

What This Has to Do With Your Commute

The commuter is becoming remarkably skilled at passing through a city without participating in it.

Headphones on.

Phone out.

Ticket contactless.

Coffee ordered through an app.

Office access by QR code.

Lunch delivered.

Home again.

It is entirely possible to spend a day surrounded by ten thousand human beings while having almost no unscripted interaction with one.

That should strike us as slightly odd.

So here's a profoundly unambitious experiment for this week.

Occasionally remove the headphones.

Buy something from a human being.

Stand somewhere rather than immediately claiming a little territory of your own.

Ask the obvious question.

Make the harmless observation.

Not because every stranger secretly contains a life-changing friendship.

Most don't.

Some contain lengthy opinions about parking.

But because a healthy society requires occasions when we encounter people we did not choose.

The algorithm already knows whom you like.

The world contains everybody else.