Seven more Irish pubs
In Enfield, Wood Green, Tottenham, Stamford Hill, Finsbury Park and more
Hello and welcome to Wooden City, a newsletter about London.
If you haven’t come here via @caffs_not_cafes, I'm a writer called Isaac Rangaswami and this is my Substack.
Every other week I publish an article about everyday places with unusual staying power, like shops, pubs, restaurants and public spaces.
Wooden City is a reader-supported publication and paid subscribers get much more. For £3.50 a month or £30 a year you can unlock maps, paywalled articles and an archive of material covering over 250 places so far.
When I first started posting about old caffs online, I didn’t question whether I had a licence to write about them, or whether I should be encouraging others to visit them too. I simply found myself interested in places that happened to be closing, many of which I felt were undersung. One of my goals with my Instagram was to remedy that.
As my audience has grown, I’ve seen first-hand how my writing can change a business. I’ve also become more conscious of how I engage with venues myself, and who I might be sending to them. As I’ve sought to cover a wider range of spaces, few of which were designed for me, those considerations have become a big part of my process. This newsletter feels like a better place to write about some of those spaces, because the act of reading is more deliberate than algorithm-led.
They include local pubs in areas I don’t live, centred around people from a country I’m not from. When I wrote about eight of these pubs in north-west London, my goal was to learn about the history of Irish people in this city, as well as the state of that diaspora today. The more time I spent in these places, the more I realised that I’d underestimated just how intimate and sensitive they could be.
In the end I visited more Irish pubs than I wrote about. And I felt okay drawing attention to those that I did because I saw them welcome other outsiders. I could see that the best of them, even the semi-private ones, were capable of including people from other communities, particularly those in Harrow with a big South Asian contingent. Most of all, I felt these were good pubs that deserved more recognition.
Today’s newsletter is a spiritual sequel to that first Irish pubs piece, this time focusing on north London proper. As before, this list includes some intimate, very Irish spaces as well as larger, more mixed ones. I’ve tried to explain what each place is like not only to capture its atmosphere, but also so you know what to expect if you haven’t been before.
Mannions Prince Arthur
I went to Mannions Prince Arthur for the second time on a Wednesday after work and found the landlord at his bar with a coffee and three newspapers, humming to himself. The racing was playing on one screen and the snooker on another. There was one other customer and she was joined by a friend shortly afterwards. “Andrew, how are you doing?” the owner said as he came in.
This is a spacious pub, and its corniced ceiling is the colour of a murky sea. An elaborate mural below it wraps around the room, depicting scenes of daily life. When I asked the proprietor about it, he told me the mural was painted by an Australian man in 1989, who worked at night and refused payment on the condition that he could drink as much as he liked.
This pub catered to younger locals as well as older ones before it featured in Time Out, and used to host Sunday popups by cheese shop Wine & Rind. Recently I saw a group of loud but harmless leather-clad millennials with mohawks ask to record a choreographed video of themselves downing their Madris at the bar. The proprietor laughed along with them between takes, and treated them with the same respect as his regulars.