FEAR AND LOATHING IN STOKE NEWINGTON 1985
It’s 1985, I am 37. Simon at work was moving to Stoke Newington and I said I would help him and his girlfriend to move. After a strenuous session we needed a break and wandered out into Stoke Newington Road. About two blocks away was an apparently welcoming Edwardian Gin Palace, the ‘Marquis of Londsdale’ so we gratefully entered, and bought some drinks at the bar.
Turning round, the first problem was that there were no tables free, and a lot of people standing. The only possible place was an odd free standing in effect horizontal plank in the middle of the room. We awkwardly clustered round either side of this and looking around became belatedly aware that the clientele were all 1958 Teddy Boys and Girls. I mean the full works; boys in velvet drape jackets, crepe soled shoes and Brylcremed quiffs; girls in pastel dresses with huge flounced five petticoat skirts and beehive hair do’s. They regarded us basically scruffy long haired hippies with evident displeasure. There was a tangibly hostile atmosphere.
Music was coming through an arch from an adjoining room, so we thought maybe we could sit down there and not be so conspicuous. It was inevitably Rock and Roll, the room was brightly lit and we could glimpse what appeared to be the corner of a stage. We tentatively approached the arch and peered through it. On the stage were about 20 Teddy Girls in two rows, line dancing to an appreciative audience, kicking their skirts up Can-
We rapidly retreated. The pub had two mutually separate rooms with the bar in the middle, serving in two opposite directions, so we could look across the bar into the other room. We thought it would be better to go there, but then noticed that it too had an exclusive clientele of what I thought at the time were Indian men (apparently now frequented by Turks, so I may have been mistaken). The contrast between the two sides was extreme, there was clearly no intermixing, and each side ignored the other and pursued its own agenda. There were, I assume, two different entrances; it was in effect two separate pubs. The effect was bizarre.
When we had drunk about half our drinks, after maybe 15 minutes, one of the Teds with a slightly menacing air of authority came up to us and asked us bluntly why we were there. We hastily explained that we were new to the area and had just walked into the nearest pub at random. He told is in no uncertain terms to finish our drinks and leave, and never come back: “We don’t like people treating us as a spectacle”. Evidently he was a gatekeeper who warned off sightseers. No doubt the same would have happened in the Indian bar.
We drank up and left, and I must say that I was conflicted -
I looked up the pub on the Web in 2024; different landlord and owner; totally revamped as a modern gastropub; re-