A quick word at the bar

Writer and professional drinksman Pete Brown on how the unspoken rules of British pub etiquette are changing

Visitors to the UK are often baffled by pub culture

I felt sorry for the American journalist. Sorry, and a little bit guilty.

I’d arranged to meet her in a pub at lunchtime, to talk about pubs. I didn’t know that she’d just got off the Red Eye and come straight from the airport to the boozer. I didn’t know it was her first visit to Britain. So when I turned up ten minutes late for our meeting, and realised that she was the woman standing in the middle of the pub, staring at the bar with her mouth open, her shoulders slumped, her arms waving vaguely, I felt bad.

When I said hello, she gripped my arm like it was a life raft, gazed at me with wide, bloodshot eyes, and croaked, ‘How do you do… THIS?’ the last word accompanied by her waving at the bar as if it were a lion tamer’s cage.

Over the next hour, we talked about the details that make English pub culture so idiosyncratically special. The ‘invisible queue’ at the bar, where people don’t really queue at all, but the principle behind queuing remains firmly in place. The buying of rounds. The clinking of glasses. The democracy of the pub, whereby real-world hierarchies are left at the door. The demarcation of space, whereby it’s great to start a conversation with a total stranger at the bar, but it would be deeply weird to then follow them to a table.