What "A House for the Public" actually means
It is painted across the top of the building in letters three feet high. Here is what we mean by it, and what it commits us to.
“Public house” is one of those phrases that has been said so many times it has stopped meaning anything. It is worth pulling apart, because the second word is doing less work than the first.
A house is somewhere you can stay. A public house is somewhere anyone can stay. That is the whole idea, and it is older than any of us.
What it commits us to
Painting a claim across the top of a building is easy. Here is what we think it obliges us to do.
Open early enough to be useful. Doors at 8am. Not 11am, not “from midday at weekends”. If a place is only available to you after work, it is not really a house for the public — it is an evening venue with a long lunch.
One room, one welcome. There is no separate café bit and pub bit with a rope between them. The coffee machine is on the bar, deliberately, where you can see it. You can order a flat white at nine at night and a Guinness at nine in the morning and nobody behind the bar will make a face.
Let people stay. The first floor has fast wifi, plugs at the tables and comfortable chairs. There is no day pass, no membership, no minimum spend and nothing to reserve. If you buy one coffee and sit there for three hours, that is fine. It has always been fine. Pubs invented that.
Arrive as strangers, leave as friends. — Painted on the mirror in the back bar
Say yes to the things pubs used to say yes to. Dogs on the ground floor. Prams. Children until nine. Someone who wants tap water and a seat. A team who have booked the function room for a wake. A choir on the pavement in December.
The building has done this before
There has been a pub on this corner since 1878. The photograph in the hallway shows H. Vidler standing outside with what looks like half of Earlsfield lined up on the pavement — children at the front, staff in aprons, a crowd that clearly did not come out for the photographer.
That is a house for the public. We are just the current tenants of the idea.
What it is not
It is not a members’ club with a friendly font. It is not a co-working space that sells beer. It is not four businesses sharing a postcode.
It is a pub on Garratt Lane that happens to be good at coffee and happens to have a quiet floor upstairs, open from eight in the morning until midnight, seven days a week.
We open in November. Come and hold us to it.
The Grosvenor Arms
The house
Posts written by whoever happened to be behind the bar, on the pass or in the cellar that week. We sign them off collectively because that is usually how they get written.
