Letter from the Tower Tavern
A former pub in the shadow of the BT Tower highlights the need for proper verbal and verbal communication in London
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A close-up of the Tower Tavern sign, which features a painting of the famous BT Tower in nearby Fitzrovia.
The Tower Tavern pub in Fitzrovia. Some speculate that, despite the foundation of Brutalism in England, the Tower Tavern didn’t survive because it did not have the Tudor/Victorian/Edwardian feel of most English pubs.
Not too long ago, I was biking through Kensington and Chelsea and stumbled across a Brutalist building straight out of the late 1960s that I assume served as a warehouse. Having stopped to check my Google maps (I am always lost in London), I looked up and saw the fantastic sign for the Tower Tavern: a pub literally in the shadow of the BT Tower. The BT Tower, like most other European telecoms and was once used to carry telecommunications traffic to the rest of the country via the tower and microwave “aerials” (antennas) formula. London’s went up in 1965 and Prime Minister Harold Wilson who cut the ribbon viewed it as a monument of a “Britain shimmering in the white heat of technology.” Currently, the BT Tower serves as a beacon for all of wandering souls (me) and runs a 360-degree LED screen ticking off news events to the public in central London.
Some would say the Tower Tavern — in homage to the BT Tower — sticks out as much as the tower itself, a blemish among the Westminster architecture. And that is the reason it possibly closed, although the English invented Brutalism and the Barbican is more Brutalist than the Tower Tavern. But most people in London — and around the world — like the Tudor or Victorian or even Edwardian feel of an English pub. Nothing else really compares. Sometimes, when a pub’s service and food are bad, it can be redeemed by that “English Pub” look. But when a pub’s service, food and beer are all of poor standard, even a Medieval look, feel and history probably can’t save it. The Tower Tavern — spirit of the swinging 60s or not — with its Chesterfield sofas, vegan/vegetarian wines and “herbal teas” didn’t make it. And no one has swooped in to save a building made in vision of Alison and Peter Smithson.
A regular canal cat hanging out on his boat hole in Regents Canal. Some photos of a London summer.
Now to the topic at hand: Lost in Translation in London.
Early(ish) in our relationship, one of my first English girlfriends bought me a book by the English anthropologist Kate Fox: Watching the English. “What’s this?” I asked her, thumbing through the green book with a photo of a mother and son sitting in a soccer stadium reading the paper under an umbrella in the pouring rain.
“Just because we speak the same language doesn’t mean we’re anything alike culturally,” she replied. She suggested I give it a read. Mind you, she was living in New York so why did I necessarily need to understand the English if she was the only English person in my life? I thought.
The book went on a shelf somewhere and ultimately, so did she.
A canal boat featuring postcards for sale in Regents Canal London,
But having moved to England two years ago, my ex’s annoying statement started ringing over and over in my head as I tried to decipher the English and their ways. Long ago forgetting where in Manhattan storage the book sat, I Amazon’ed a copy and started reading. I now understand the reasons 275,000 copies of this book have been sold in the UK alone. Let’s just say that the English are, uh… tricky.
A canal boat afloat during an Islington summer.
Having been raised in Oklahoma, I was, more or less, taught Southern(ish) manners: don’t air dirty laundry (personal information); be careful about voicing anything controversial; and talk about everyone and everything behind someone’s back, never to someone’s face. I called it the “smile to the face, stab in the back” approach. This approached mostly worked until I moved to Manhattan and enrolled in journalism school in 2001. It was a double-barreled blast of bluntness. In New York, if one doesn’t say exactly what one wants in the fastest, most concise, clearest and occasionally, aggressive, manner, one does not get what one wants or needs. I knew I had started to change when I came home to Tulsa for Christmas 2001 and I could barely sit through a dinner party. I realized the transformation was complete when, in 2014, I landed in Minneapolis for a plane change and rolled my eyes after hearing a barista’s five-minute morning story when the only thing I wanted was a cup of coffee.
A couple bicycling through the boat scene on the Regents Canal near Islington.
Crash. Boom. Into England I descended in 2021 after I decided I had started turning into someone I didn’t like that much. True, I romanticized England — and Europe — in general. True, moving to a new city, and especially country, is always more difficult than anticipated. True, I have a tendency to want — and expect — things to work out the way I want. At two years in, however, when I took a step back and saw that my acquired American journalistic, ahem, straightforwardness just wasn’t making me friends anymore, I consulted Watching the English.
A canal boat carries tourists through the Regents Canal near Kings Cross.
Lesson number one in English society: class is everything. Lesson number two: the way people communicate indicates class. Civility gets one everywhere and stating the obvious is a direct ticket to social bardo. Lesson three: ironic comedy and self-deprecation is the rule of law; aggrandizement — or even a perfectly fine, tiny boast — is akin to manner murder. And the final lesson of today: the English are always right. Arguing or verbal dancing gets one nowhere on that fact.
I have obviously overstated and generalized and spun this for effect. Stereotypes are unfair and very often, wrong. Many do exist for a reason, however. Mostly, I seem to have adapted away from my 18-year-old self settled and learned, moved and then realized that my Oklahoma persona is better suited for my current life. At night, I read passages of my Watching the English as if it was my guide to surviving England. I study words to use or not use — words like “pardon” (an American colloquialism) and “settee” or “serviette” (terms we never use anyway and will be guaranteed to never use now) — and I seem to have censored my way into a conundrum of self-doubt.
They say you are a New Yorker — no matter where you’re from — after two years. I spent 20 there. I am wondering when I will fit in here? Will abiding by Watching the English make me a Londoner? Will adopting the ways of the English make me a happier, more likeable person? How do I stay true to myself and be wanted and respected by these people? Do I care that much? When will this end?
An artist’s canal boat in Central London.
I have no answers to this. I’m not really in a major existential crisis and I am still happy I made the move. I do like many things better over here: the greenery, the history, old pubs, tennis clubs, understatement, detective shows, weird China with coats-of-arms and the queen’s face, tradition, some pageantry, Earl Grey tea with milk, houseboats, the Arctic Monkeys, Barbour jackets and soccer matches (on occasion). I don’t want to move back to New York. I think I mostly miss my friends and the not giving a fuck about social currency.
More than two years after the pandemic, I think that many of us are still finding our footing. Not all of the answers are in Watching the English, I know, but I hope it will help until I reach my final destination.
The 621 foot high BT Tower was Britain’s most poorly kept secret. Londoners were expected to not notice its presence, in fact for many years it did not appear on any map as its location was protected by the Official Secrets Act, even the taking and storing photographs of the building was forbidden.