Culture & Daily Life: Pubs. Roasts. Black cabs.

Pubs, The Social Fabric

London has around 3,500 pubs. The UK has 44,650. Few institutions have shaped British social life more completely, or for longer.

The pub's ancestors were Roman. When the legions arrived in Britain, they set up drinking houses along their roads. The tradition never really left.

The hanging signs you see outside every pub were a matter of necessity. In an age when most people could not read, a painted image told you which establishment you were walking into. A red lion, a white horse, a crown, a bell. In 1393, King Richard II passed an Act making the signs compulsory, so his ale tasters could find the right premises to inspect. The Act has long since gone. The signs are still there.

Many of London's oldest pubs began as coaching inns, the motorway service stations of their era. Before railways, travelling between cities meant days on the road by horse-drawn carriage. Inns provided food, drink, a bed for the night, and stabling for the horses. Look closely at the old pubs around central London and you will still find the covered archway wide enough for a carriage to pass through, the cobbled courtyard behind, the stable buildings now converted into something else. The journey is long gone. The architecture remains.

A pub owned by a brewery and obliged to sell only that brewery's beer became known as a tied house. By the end of the nineteenth century, over 90% of English pubs were tied. An independent pub, free to serve whatever it chose, became known as a free house. If you see those words above a pub door, the pub is independent.

If you are out with a group, you should know about rounds. One person buys the drinks for everyone. Then the next person does. And so on. It is not a system. It is a social contract.

Respect the queue at the bar. There is no line, but there is an order. Bar staff know it. Everyone else knows it. Now you do too.

Visitors to a British pub often find a table, sit down, and wait. Nothing happens. This is not poor service. It is simply how pubs work. The bar is where everything happens. Some pubs do offer table service at quieter times or during meals, often with an optional 12.5% added to the bill. If the service has been good, leave it on.

Many pubs introduced QR ordering during the pandemic, and a lot of them kept it. If there is a code on your table, use it. If not, head to the bar.

If you are not sure what to order, just ask. Most bar staff will happily let you taste a beer or a wine before you commit. Completely normal. Completely free.

Most traditional pubs do not have televisions, and many consider this a feature rather than a flaw. The ones that do show sport pay around £1,200 a month for a commercial licence, and since 1960 a rule has prohibited live football broadcasts between 2:45pm and 5:15pm on Saturdays to protect the attendances of lower league clubs. Sunday matches broadcast freely. The rule is on its way out, but for now, if you fancy watching the 3pm Premier League kick-off, you watch it on the radio.

A quick word about food. A pub, short for public house, is at the heart of British culture. A place to drink, meet your neighbours, and put the world to rights. Food is often available, but it is rarely the main event. A gastropub is something different: a pub that takes its food as seriously as any restaurant, without losing the warmth and informality that makes a pub a pub. There is no official qualification to carry the name, but it is not a title to be taken lightly. The best ones are recognised by the Good Pub Guide, Michelin, and the Estrella Damm Gastropub Guide. You can usually tell the difference the moment the food arrives. The best of both worlds, some would say. I would agree.

Pubs are not just where Londoners drink. They are where the city thinks, argues, celebrates, grieves, and occasionally solves its problems.

The Sunday Roast

The tradition traces back to 1485. Henry VII's royal guards were rewarded with roast beef after church on Sundays, which is how they earned the nickname Beefeaters, a name the Tower of London's ceremonial guards still carry today.

The Yorkshire pudding began as a way to stretch a meal, cooked beneath the roasting meat to catch the drippings, served as a starter to fill people up before the main course.

In a poll of Britons, the Sunday roast ranked in the top three things people love about Britain, alongside fish and chips and the NHS. That is the company it keeps.

If you are in London on a Sunday, find a good pub and order one.

TfL and the Tube

The London Underground opened its first section in 1863, the oldest metro system in the world.

11 lines, 402 kilometres, 272 stations. Up to 5 million journeys every single day.

Tap in. The city opens up.

Black Cabs and The Knowledge

To become a licensed black cab driver, candidates must memorise around 25,000 streets within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. It takes most candidates between two and four years.

Every journey is driven by someone who knows the city better than almost anyone.

Britain's Inventions

The steam engine. The railway. The jet engine. The telephone. The television, first public broadcasts from Alexandra Palace in North London. Penicillin. The foundations of modern computing from Alan Turing. The world's first cash machine: Barclays Bank, Enfield, north London, 1967.

And then, in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He gave it to the world for free.

The website you used to find Charlies XP. In some way, it traces back to this island.

London has always been a place where ideas take hold. Some of them changed everything.

Leave Them to Their Lunch

London is one of the favourite cities of the most famous people in the world. Not because of the hotels or restaurants, though it has both. But because of an unwritten rule everyone seems to understand instinctively.

Let them be.

No photographs without permission. No interruptions mid-meal. No scenes in the street. Notice quietly, mention it to whoever you're with once out of earshot, and get on with your day. It is not indifference. It is a form of respect Londoners extend to everyone, famous or not.

Over the years, wandering this city the way Charlie does, the encounters accumulate. Gordon Ramsay at a restaurant table. Elizabeth Hurley on a street in Mayfair. JK Rowling in a quiet corner. Sharon Stone. Gary Neville. Prince Harry. Zinedine Zidane. Each time, London did what London always does.

Nobody made a fuss.

The unwritten rule is not enforced. It is not taught. It is simply understood.

If you do spot someone, enjoy the moment. Then leave them to their lunch.

“We need to protect our pubs,” said Prince William. I couldn’t agree more.

“I love pubs. I want to do as much as I can to support them because I love the community. We need to protect our pubs.”

Prince William is right. Pubs are worth protecting, not out of nostalgia, but because of what they still do and mean for modern Britain.

A good pub is not just a business selling alcohol. It is a place of employment, a community room, a family lunch spot, a shelter from the rain, a meeting point and a piece of local history. It can also be somewhere to stay. Across the UK, pub accommodation has been estimated at around 6,000 businesses providing more than 50,000 bedrooms. When pubs close, we do not just lose bars and dining rooms. In many parts of the country, we also lose beds for walkers, families, workers, tourists and people visiting the places big hotel chains do not always reach.

Jeremy Clarkson has shown another example of the same challenge. The Farmer’s Dog, has brought huge attention to pubs, British farming and local supply chains, and yet he has also spoken openly about how difficult and expensive it is to run one properly. If a pub with national publicity, queues outside and a famous owner can still feel the pressure, imagine what it is like for the ordinary local pub trying to keep the lights on.

The British Beer and Pub Association reported that 161 pubs closed across Britain in the first three months of 2026, almost two every day. That is not just a hospitality problem. It is a community problem, a jobs problem and a high-street problem too.

Protecting pubs cannot just mean kind words after another one closes. It needs policy that understands how pubs actually work.

My view is simple: a closed pub pays no VAT, no business rates, no employer taxes, no corporation tax and creates no local life. A viable pub may pay less tax per pint, but more tax overall through jobs, sales, suppliers, tourism, high streets and profit.

In order to save pubs, we need to stop treating them as ordinary alcohol outlets and start treating them as a vital part of our social fabric and a major contributor to local communities and the wider economy. Because once a good pub is gone, it rarely comes back.

Cheers,

Charlie