Essay Review George Orwell THE Moon Under Water

The perfect pub but there’s a twist

ESSAY REVIEW – GEORGE ORWELL – THE MOON UNDER WATER

Written for his column in the London Evening Standard for February 9th 1946, this delightful and ultimately surprising essay describes Orwell’s favourite public house. It became the direct inspiration for the Wetherspoons chain in creating their bars, and in each city that Wetherspoons establish pubs one at least is likely to be called The Moon Under Water. The Manchester Deansgate bar of that name is the biggest pub in Britain.

So what of the essay itself? Orwell puts bar atmosphere before the quality of the ale. Friendly customers are always more important than drunken louts. He would probably object to modern binge drinking culture.

To Orwell, it is the regular customers who make a pub, where everyone knows everyone. Strangers might not have been appreciated in his middle class outlook.

His Moon Under Water had a fake but pleasing Victoriana feel, so he likes middle class traditionalism

He likes the idea of a separate lady’s bar – clearly not an option in the modern age of equality.

Orwell applauds the absence of live music and pianos – a part of the Wetherspoons ethos being a no to the jukebox, though sport-screen TV is often acceptable to them.

Orwell describes the pub as a convenience store where stamps and aspirins (presumably for treating the hangovers to follow the drinking sessions) were as available as the beer. 

Orwell despised the then incoming modern straight glass pint pot, preferring a handled China mug, retained in The Moon long after they became unfashionable.

Orwell loved the pub’s beer garden, and seemed to defend to right of children to purchase alcohol, though acknowledging that the practice of serving them was as illegal in the immediate post war years as it remains now.

Orwell ends the essay with a bombshell twist worthy of his great novels – the pub he describes so lovingly did not exist. He found no pub that carried all its qualities, and the essay is a lament for the decline of British drinking establishments. Even the chain inspired by the utopian pub described fail to create one exactly matching its ambience. The Wetherspoons pub in Collindale, off London’s Edgeware Road is the nearest to the location Orwell gave his idealized tavern

Arthur Chappell

Link to the essay http://www.whitebeertravels.co.uk/orwell.html