The Buckingham Arms, Petty France
It's sad news, this. When I was a civil servant (yes, I'm afraid I was, and for a fair while, too) I used to be a regular at the Buckingham. And a fine pub it was, too. The beer was Young's - I usually would order the ordinary bitter as a session with my mates (well, I'm think of one in particular) could easily extend to five or six pints, and some standards are required even in the governance of the country. He'd be on the Special. The beer was excellent, which was why the Buckingham was repeatedly listed in the Good Beer Guide, but there was much more to it than the beer. There was something special about the feel of this pub.
Occasionally I'd stand outside in warm weather; but rarely, because the interior was so cosy. On entering on a Friday night, say, you'd find the one, long room packed, but service was always quick as anything, and usually you could at least find a place to prop your pint on the shelf that ran along the side, on one of the high tables people would stand at, or at the bar. But soon you'd notice that seats became available inside the big bulging bow window at the front, in a comfy armchair or on one of the cushion-backed benches against the wall. One settled there, you wouldn't want to move - that was one of the most comfortable spots in the capital. Alternatively, soon you'd be able to sit round a table towards the back, again on Victorian-style cushioned benches and stools. There was a time when the Buckingham was full of smoke, of course. Well, the disappearance of the smoke was a change I welcomed. But it was also full of talk: the talk of disgruntled, passed-over officials and their mates from the Ministry of Justice, say, of men in well-worn suits and women in pin-stripes. There was a lot of talk of politics and a lot of laughter. And the only sound was talk - or, well, talk mingled with the sound of glasses being collected and crisps being munched. The Buckingham was that most delightful thing, a pub without piped music. The simple sound of voices is the perfect one for a pub - once you realise this, you never want anything else - and that's what you got at the Buckingham. There was a resident dog, too, a big, lazy, creamy-white thing whose breed I couldn't tell you (I was always awful at that sort of thing; I should have got the Observer's Book of Dogs when I was little, I suppose) but who lay on his side and tended to get stroked a bit as the evening wore on. The Buckingham was the ideal London pub, a place I regularly took visitors to London - Americans loved it - and where all sorts happened. My friend Sappho and I once sat next to a pair of horticulturalists designing a garden for an RHS competition, and by the end of the night we'd mucked in with our own ideas.
Well, that's all gone, now. The Buckingham, as I found out when I took a friend there the other day, has had a "makeover", a word that makes any true pub-lover's heart sink. The comfy benches have been torn out, replaced by nasty, narrow, cheap floral pouffe-type seats, and the old-fashioned tables have been replaced by horrible clunking things that look as though they came from IKEA, with sharp edges. Some of the tables and seats are raised up high, of course, in an effort to appeal to youth, I suppose - no one seemed to want to sit at those tables. In fact, there were not many people there at all, at eight on a Friday night. Time was, you'd feel lucky to have a seat at that time. Now, there's plenty of "choice" of places you wouldn't especially choose to sit. The walls are covered, sickeningly, with quotes from authors like Dr. Johnson, although he'd have snorted with derision at the clichéd decor and with disgust at the subtraction of pleasure from this tavern. The beer was a little too chilled, I thought, and my friend and I were treated to the awful sound of Blondie coming from the newly-erected speakers, put up perhaps to fill in for the lack of human warmth. Predictably, it wasn't loud enough to listen to, but was too loud to be ignored. Piped music like this really is an offence against music as well as against conversation, I think. The dog is gone too, of course. There'll be no stroking him any more.
It's a real loss, this, made all the more bitter by the nasty, sarcastic attitude of the surly bloke I presume to be the landlord, who explained the changes to me by saying "we're going after customers now, mate," (I looked around me somewhat ostentatiously at that point, which seemed to rile him) and advised me mockingly to frequent Wetherspoons pubs in future, making it obvious from his tone that he has the same contempt for that chain as he had for me - although by the state of his pub, he's no right to take that attitude. The man's a vandal and a fool, and deserves to lose money. In fact, we ended the evening at The Speaker, a quite terrific pub where I'm glad to say it's certainly not last orders .
I'm not alone, as you can see here. One day I hope the Buckingham will be restored, and others will know what it once was. It's not worth visiting now, though. I'm not against all change; but I do hate it when something unique, vital and real is destroyed to make way for something tacky, samey and fake.
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