Finding the perfect pub is so notoriously difficult that George Orwell famously had to invent one in his The Moon Under Water essay, first published in this paper in 1946. The best part of 80 years later, and two young Londoners have dreamt up something the great polemicist may have found euphonious: Pub Club.
Not, as the name might suggest, a monthly meet-up for life’s hellraisers, the invention of Tom Ireland-Life and Freddie Bermingham is an app promising solutions for anyone fancying a pint but with no particular place to go. It was born out of an unfulfilling afternoon for the pair, both 24. “Tom and I were sat on the sofa looking for a pub for about six hours of sport,” Bermingham remembers. “It was this grey, miserable day and we started googling for pubs with fireplaces, sofas, Sky Sports and a Sunday Roast.”
An hour later, and with the Arsenal-Chelsea kick-off looming, the pair admitted defeat. “We settled for just the roast and SkySports,” Bermingham says, sounding glum. “But we thought, there must be an easier way of doing this.”
Apparently not; after Christmas, they began pulling together the app. The premise is simple: would-be drinkers sign up, choose their criterion for what a perfect pub entails, and the app lists the places that meet those criteria, arranged by proximity to the user (or from a chosen address, for those planning in advance). “We want to be the first place people go when they’re looking for a pub nearby,” says Bermingham.
What makes the pair’s proposition as plausible as it is compelling is the sheer number of parameters in place; this is more specific than any dating app. Things start with nine main categories: comfort, affordability, drinks, music, sports, outdoors space, activities, food, accessibility. Each house subcategories and there are 55 specifics overall that one could request: do you want your outdoor space up on a rooftop, say, or looking out over the river (or both)? Are you looking for craft ale? Do you care about draft wine? Does it need to have a jukebox? What about veggie options?
But how to find out if places do or don’t do these sorts of things? “Well, we walked to them all. ” says Bermingham, as if it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do. “I think it only took us two-and-a-half months.” Still, after 10 weeks, the Wandsworth-based duo had popped into 400 pubs, or about 12 per cent of the capital’s total. Pints cannot have been tried at all (both the boys are still alive).
At present, the Pub Club heads from Wandsworth to Peckham, on a route that the crow would fly only if it had been on the vodkas (the journey zig-zags between Fulham, Chelsea, Clapham, Balham, Tooting, Elephant and Castle and Borough on its way). “We’re heading up into Hackney, Dalston and Islington next,” says Bermingham. This circumnavigation of the centre of town is deliberate, he adds. “The variation in pubs there isn’t always that great,” is the explanation, “and in terms of footfall, I’m not sure we’d give them as much as we can in places a little further out.” Still, they’re hoping to have 2000 places on the books before the year is out.
The app, available for both Android and Apple, is free for users and at present for pubs too, though for the operators, a subscription fee is expected one day to follow. And while a pub can apply to join the app before the Pub Club team have visited them, it won’t be shown until it’s been visited to prove it has everything promised.
“We want to make sure pubs can market their USPs, talk about their pub quizzes or list the gigs they’ve got coming up on the app’s ‘chalkboard’,” says Bermingham. In other words, it’s a chance to a place to explain to drinkers why they’ve just found their new favourite local. If we’d had all this in 1946, perhaps Orwell would never had to put pen to paper in the first place.
