Dog's Dinner - Ploughman's Lunch, Pub Aesthetics and Punk Attitude

It is common knowledge that the Ploughmans Lunch is as much an invention of the twentieth century as Chicken Tikka Masala, and as quintissentially British. It owes its existence to relaxation of milk rationing and industrialisation of food production, when mechanised processes met copious raw product. This age of dubious 'progress' also brought us the Chorleywood Bread Method. Chorleywood was the home of the British Baking Industries Research Association. In 1961, its boffins hit upon what they deemed to be the holy grail of a no time bread production method. Whilst it may not hold a candle to geological time, bread time is a slow clock. Three and a half hours is considered a no time dough, because it does not allow for adequate fermentation. Instead, ascorbic acid, fat, extra yeast and vigourous mechanical pummeling acheive in a few hours what had previously required a day or so. Well, in truth, they don't. They result in a cuboid of aqeous baked flour that tastes of nothing more than the sum of its parts. 

What I am about here is not a history lesson in the debasement of our most basic staple foods. There is a subtler force to be reckoned with, and that is how these products are dressed up and marketed. Mentioning no brands, only a mother with an appalling disregard for the health of her family could be proud of serving them the sliced white colon clogging chemical rich abomination that readily flies off supermarket shelves. 'Farmhouse' is a monicker applied to British bread as though it means something. Eating this garbage is as elementally English as pushing your bicycle up a cobbled hill to the sound of Dvorak's New World Symphony. Which brings us back to the 'Ploughman's'. Why, in an age of mechanisation (the end result of which is the product you're trying to sell), would it seem prudent to dream up an image of Olde English bucolicism? Why appeal to that misty and misunderstood collective imagined past, of Piers Ploughman and Walter Scott?

The fact is that histoy sells. Or rather, the idea of history sells, the misunderstanding of ideas such as 'tradition' and 'heritage'. It's something to retreat into, especially when it feels as though the modern world might be getting too much for us. When British cities first bulged with their populations of former rustics as a result of the Industrial Revolution, the PR coup for countryside, farmers, and Morris dancing had yet to be acheived. British pubs that belong to the golden age of pub design, roughly a couple of decades either side of the turn of the twentieth cenury, delight because they are unashamedly urban, rather, they are celebratory of their city location. Probably the jewel in this crown is Walter Thomas's Philharmonic in Liverpool; gaudy, trashy, over elaborate, polished, and joyful. 

What came later down the line in terms of pub design, still haunts us today. I am talking about the  ignorant stick on hisortricism that crept into bed with the various idioms employed in the building of roadhouses between the wars. Post-war, it became triumphant, and found its apogee in the B-road half timbered monstrocities that  became willing hosts to the parasitism of the Carvery Years. We have evolved to expect a sort of shorthand when it comes to public house interiors. Firstly, there must be wood. Plenty of it, and it must be stained dark and polished. Next comes brass. Nothing screams 'pub' like shiny brass abutting shiny wood. After that, a subsidiary list of elements all collude to tell us we are drinking in a proper pub; stained or etched glass, old black and white photographs of local sites, upholstery that mimicks carpeting. The primacy of beer, and its links to the less than sober British nostalgia gland, point to reasoning behind dressing up a new industrial product as the 'Ploughman's Lunch'.

Modern pub design, and refurbishment, is mindful of this state of affairs. Sheffield's 'Devonshire Cat' makes a fair stab at ticking off he checklist, wood, brass, upholstery and so on. Unfortunately, because the space is horribly unforgiving, the end result is something akin to a decent steakhouse in a continental service station. The expansive low ceiling single room-space only allows for box pew type seating. A more succesful essay in pub design is the refurbishment of the Broadfield. Ironically, though interior walls have been removed, the end result is nothing like the sort of open plan desecration pubs suffered in the later twentieth century. The result is subtle and also somewhat bizarre. There is wood (of course), and brass, and also stained glass. Skilful use of architectural salvage has resulted in a space that is at once open, and yet closed in with partions and cubicles.  More bizarrely, the interior decorator has hedged their bets and gone fifty percent pub, fifty percent mid century railway carriage/waiting room. Although it is utterly nonsensical, it works, and why shouldn't it? It is the job of every pub designer to invent their own fiction.

In all likelihood, Sheffield is about to get a pub from Brewdog, a company with its own particular aesthetic, one of rebelliousness and non conformity at all costs. It is therefore unsurprising that in an effort to stand out, they should turn against all things 'pub' in terms of interior design. The Devonshire Street outlet will doubtless be all stripped wood, hard edges and right angles and gleaming chromium. Not content with pitting themselves against the received notions of brewing and drinking (gosh, how punk!), the abandonment of of beer's architectural trappings is as much a statement as anything that rolls out of their mighty public relations department.