London is home to a wide variety of hostelries, be they wet led backstreet boozers clinging on in heavily residential areas, chain pubs dominating the high streets or culinary fans getting their fix in one of the city’s many gastropubs.

Tastes and fashions always evolve, but I see a sharply changing landscape in many of the pubs I seek out and visit for the first time. My explorations have revealed numerous parts of residential and working-class London marginalised, left behind and forgotten under the false banner of progress. Modern tastes dictate that the simple joy of going for a soak in the local boozer at the end of a hard day’s graft is now old hat. Huge numbers of these traditional working class venues have vanished or are perceived as little more than the haunts of nearly extinct dinosaurs. Many younger twenty-first century Londoners, it seems, demonstrate a greater inclination to visit cocktail bars, coffee shops and craft beer taprooms than drink cheap lager whilst propping up the bar in a traditional local pub.

While there is nothing wrong with these types of establishments the seasoned pub veteran is not part of this new target demographic. As gentrification and development swallows up traditional inner-London very soon the old boy in the pub, clinging to a bygone way of life, will have nowhere to go.  

While pubs have rightly had to diversify to survive by bringing in a more gastronomical element, hosting events and appealing to a wider cross section of the community a more traditional way of pub life and pub goer is in danger of vanishing without a trace.

Below are some of my thoughts on a rapidly evolving culture that will likely end up consigned to the history books. I wish to witness and document as much of it as possible before it disappears.