Rising East Online

Jan Bowman

That’s Entertainment

I was an East End pub landlord

Niall Crowley explains how teenage ideas of rebellion led him on a strange journey to ‘Murder Mile’

—Niall Crowley

Years ago I harboured a fantasy of starting a radical cabaret club. It was going to be little a beacon of civilisation, a space for debate and big ideas, and maybe some biting satire and performance. This was the early 1980s, Margaret Thatcher was taking on the working class and winning, as well as dragging us into war. Someone had to do something. I was an angry teenager with no outlet for my ideas and grievances. I'd never been near a political meeting or demo, but I had just 'discovered' the Weimar Republic and its avant-garde cabaret clubs in the 1920s. However I was unemployed and living 15 floors up in a West Bromwich tower block, so eventually I conceded it was unlikely to ever happen.

I could never quite let go of the idea, so 20 years later when I came into a modest amount of money I decided to try out my little fantasy – with some modifications. The radical cabaret didn’t seem to fit with my idea of the world any more, perhaps because Britain had become a different place, or maybe I was just older and fancied something more gentle. By this time I was thinking more about some kind of private members’ club. I imagined an Enlightenment (and enlightening) gathering like the Lunar Society where leading thinkers and industrialists got together to discuss and promote science and reason.

At a time when anyone with any money was investing in the booming UK property market, I persuaded my long-suffering partner that we should put all funds into buying an old London pub, shop or restaurant as the first step on the road to fulfilling my destiny of creating London's most infamous and progressive members’ club. We decided to start out by opening a café bar or maybe a gastro pub, depending on what property we could get our hands on. It became clear after a short while that we were never going to be able to afford a central London location. We found and almost got a couple of very nice places around Islington, and then a pub on Holloway Road slipped through our fingers at the last moment. After months of hunting and lowering our expectations somewhat, we bought a lease on a dying East End boozer in Lower Clapton.

We were relatively new to London and living south of the river in Greenwich, so were initially unaware that our first enterprise was in an area known to many as ‘Murder Mile’. Even when we did get an inkling, we presumed the area’s reputation was hyped-up, so weren't unduly worried. Besides, my partner Jason had grown up in the pub trade and was running bars and handling difficult situations as a teenager. When I met first met him he was 18 and managing a private drinking club in Birmingham frequented by some of the city’s more colourful characters – people whose names most folk only dared whisper. I had very little bar experience but my upbringing as the youngest member of a big Irish family on a Black Country council estate was anything but sheltered. And after all, we were in London! We were confident that there were enough ‘nice’ people around to appreciate the highly civilised drinking establishment we were about to create.

Things didn't start too well. We had entered into a lease that was highly disadvantageous to us, but we had little choice because we couldn't find or afford anything else. The negotiations were completed only minutes before opening time. When the deal was finally done we opened the doors at 4pm and in came a trickle of customers. The Priory Tavern, now our very own pub, had a hard core of about eight. On opening night though, it seemed half the neighbourhood had come along to check us out.

In the main bar there was a large pool table, a big screen for football nights (every night), a row of bar stools reserved strictly for the Priory's ‘In Crowd’, and a selection of toys and games for their children who they came to the pub straight after school. The lounge area at the back had a couple of dirty old sofas, donated by customers, plus a really odd assortment of chairs and tables. A thick red carpet and some potted geraniums gave it a bit of a 1970s ‘grandmother’s front room’ feel – either that or it was trendy Hoxton chic and we were too uncool to realise.

Hiding in the lounge you'd find the 'occasional' customers – keeping their heads down and drinking in the Priory only because there was nowhere else to go. 'Occasional' customers rarely ventured into the bar. It wasn't an especially rough pub – it’s just that the place was dying on its feet and the hard core liked it that way, with the run of the place to themselves. ‘Occasional’ customers were not especially welcome; even the previous landlady ignored them.

On the night of our takeover there were a few minor fireworks – a couple of altercations over the pool table and some blokes got upset over the European game on the big screen. To most customers we were a mildly amusing curiosity, but to the hard core we were the enemy. The leader of the pack was roly poly mobile mechanic, Rocco. After talking to me like his pet bitch for most of the evening, Rocco summoned me over to his corner and put on his best East End hard-man act: ‘Don't forget, this is our pub and you're just running it for us’. I had been warned. It wasn't long before we realised that all the old bangers parked in front of the pub (in bits) were Rocco's 'work in progress'. Not only did this man own our pub, he owned the street too!

By this time I was getting a bit worried that there might be some truth in the whole East End gangster thing, and was expecting a knock at the door at any moment from the protection guys. Jason, always more level headed, told me I was being silly: old pubs were full of idiots and fantasists like Rocco. So we put up with this and some other nonsense for a week before announcing we were closing for a refurb. We gave the regulars back their pool cues, personalised pint glasses, deck chairs (really!) and other stuff stored behind the bar, in the office and down the cellar, and closed the doors on the Priory Tavern.

On a shoestring budget and with the help of friends and family, we spent a month renovating the pub and drinking ourselves silly on the ‘soon to be out of date’ stock (the upstairs 7-bed flat took us another two years). We paid my invaluable brother in Guinness because we had so little money. We'd optimistically applied for grants and support from 'Small Business' this, 'Enterprise' that and 'East London Startup' the other. All we got was armfuls of glossy-but-useless literature and countless offers to help us write a business plan. So after the pub company (our landlord and owners of some 4,000 other pubs) and the solicitors had finished with us, we had very little money to spend.

No one had done much to the place over the years, so we had a lot of work to do. What had been done by the previous leaseholders – tearing out the pub's original windows, floor-to-ceiling green and orange tiles in the 1930s upstairs bathroom, and a floral red carpet in the bar and lounge – just created more work for us. Luckily none of the previous owners had got around to destroying the art deco wall panelling or the beautifully curved bar in the lounge. They were battered and neglected but still gave the place some character. However, to add to our financial woes we were obliged to buy all the old furniture for an extortionate amount…. and hire a skip to dump it in.

By the end of April 2001 we were ready to unveil The Eclipse. A week of running the Priory Tavern had convinced us that it should be erased from history, hence the name change. Along with the old name, we threw out the thick-pile carpet, TV screen, geraniums and the hard core's prized, bar stools. The pool table and gaming machines were returned to the leasing company and the whole place was cleared of years of crap and clutter, aka 'cultural artefacts’, if you're a design historian.

Both inside and out were newly painted. The walls of the bar were adorned with two huge Eclipse-themed montages created by an old friend, Dave Krynski. In the lounge on the shiny deco panelling we hung a couple of stunning framed photos donated by photographer Elaine Constantine.

Our piéce de résistance was the newly-restored parquet floor, found hiding under layers of carpet, levelling cement and hardboard. It took three days just to remove thousands of staples and nails from crumbling wood tiles. A few doubters said the floor was beyond repair and that we should cover it back up and let it rest in peace, but after a lot of faith and hard work the floor came up stunning. A couple of years later our interior was written about by the Evening Standard and real ale group CAMRA, both of whom listed The Eclipse among the top five pub interiors in London.

On the bar sat a shiny new cappuccino machine. It wasn't there for show – we'd sourced great coffee beans and our espresso and cappuccino acquired near-legendary status across East London. Our wine list would have made any West End hotel proud, though for the first week, until we found a supplier, we had to drive to Majestic every other day.

We introduced some good new ales and beers. While still in short trousers Jason was trained in the ancient skill of cellar-keeping, so our ales were always well-kept – except of course when the cooling equipment broke down, which was often. In fact everything broke down. We had to replace boilers, constantly fix the ice machine and glass washer, repair leaking roofs, install central heating and so on. One of our ongoing problems was that our lease stipulated that we were responsible for upkeep and repairs of this huge building that had been so neglected over the years. The lease also forced us to buy all our beer from the landlord, and believe me it wasn't cheap. We couldn’t afford to transform the outside area, or more importantly, build a proper kitchen, so most of our food plans went out of the window. These things made it impossible for us ever to make much money, no matter how successful other aspects of the business might be. And thankfully The Eclipse was a hit right from the start.

We had no idea where all the people came from. On opening night there were hundreds. The crowd spilled out onto the street. Almost everybody, including many of the old customers, were full of praise for what we had done; and there was such a buzz in the neighbourhood. The overwhelming opinion was that we had created a genuine, modern local. After a short while our new regulars began to refer to us as the 'community centre'. I always grimaced at the term but it was true; it became the hub of the community in a real sense.

A few cynics and miserablists accused us of ‘gentrification’ and a takeover by the middle classes, but our new customers were far from being all white and middle class. We had bus drivers, teachers, builders, film makers, Russians, Belgians and Eritreans to name a few. My barber, my dentist and the man who owned the kebab shop all drank in The Eclipse. After-work groups and networks sprang up. Our most loyal group of post-work drinkers called themselves the 'Monday Club', though in reality they were in most evenings.

We introduced people to one another who later became best friends; some even got married and had children. We had a drama group, a lesbian football team and a book club. This might all sound horribly worthy or politically correct but we didn’t wave any multi-coloured flags – it happened and people just got on. So many public bodies and private companies feel they can't cope today without codes of behaviour, diversity policies or cultural awareness training. We simply had very high standards, gave out a nice vibe and that was about it. They were all adults so we let people get on with it.

We had our share of excitement and glamour! We met a couple of minor film and pop stars in the pub. We hosted photo shoots and a BBC documentary – all of which were more trouble than they were worth. For a couple of evenings we had our own resident opera singer. One of our customers had recently traced her long-lost father, a retired Venezuelan tenor who had met her mother while touring here in the 1960s. He was a highly entertaining character as well as a bit of a 'ladies man', and after lots of begging and free drinks he agreed to sing. When he opened his mouth and this big sound came out, the whole pub was stunned into awed silence and passers by crossed the street and peered through the windows to see where it was coming from.

All kinds of odd and mysterious folk would drink in The Eclipse. We had a very sweet Romanian guy who said almost nothing and usually sat in a corner drinking Stella or an espresso, minding his own business. His face was well known and he was greeted by everybody, but he never said a word to any of us. One evening he came in and started acting like he'd had a personality transplant. I was serving behind the bar and he insisted on buying me a drink and sitting me down for a chat. It was a fairly awkward conversation – he ‘no English’, me ‘no Romanian’ – but he seemed very happy. He bought a round of drinks for the Monday Club and stood at the bar playing chess with other drinkers for the rest of the evening. From then on he was everybody's drinking buddy and chess partner. The fact that he couldn't speak English never seemed to get in the way.

For a while it seemed that small, incongruous groups of Americans would appear out of the blue and disappear just as mysteriously. The other strange thing was that they invariably looked like rejects from the New York Dolls. These odd-looking but always friendly folk would mostly appear on a Sunday evening, stay all night – then we'd never see them again. It transpired that a few streets away some bloke had turned his Victorian terraced house into a recording studio, using only old valve technology that other, digitised studios had long since dispensed with. This stuff had become fashionable again amongst certain types of musician, for whom this guy's studio is the ultimate rock dream.

I found all this out when I turned on the radio one morning to find that Radio Four’s Today programme was doing a live report from there. I caught the reporter telling us excitedly that groups like the White Stripes been laying down tracks. I hadn't realised that the Jarvis Cocker-like bloke who used to come to the pub always dressed in a shiny acrylic 1950s cardigan, was in fact a world-renowned studio owner, and some of those weird Americans could have been the White Stripes, though I wouldn’t have known them from R. White’s.

Finally, I’m not always a great fan of the charity sector, but we got involved with a great organisation based near the pub called WorldWrite. Together we organised some weird and wonderful nights, usually inspired and fronted by their energetic Chief Executive Ceri Dingle. We had a troupe of Ugandan drummers who made their debut about a week after the opera singer. God knows what the neighbours though was going on. We organised cocktail evenings with pina colada served in hollowed-out pineapples, a Shakespeare night and Bollywood night to name only a few.

And what about the Murder Mile label and life in an inner city death trap? In three years there was no serious trouble and there were certainly no fights at The Eclipse. Sometimes bad things happened in the area – probably always have – but most of what we read in the newspapers about the dangers of life in Murder Mile bore little relation to the experiences of people living there.

Last year there was a shooting outside a school less than a hundred metres from the pub. It was a nasty incident and attracted a lot of media attention. The following morning we found news crews banging on our door, asking for interviews. We saw them speak to lots of people on the street outside the pub, and then we saw which interviews made it onto the news bulletins. You can guess what kind of comments the media gatekeepers wanted to hear.

Talking to the news crews (we foolishly took mercy on them and allowed to come inside from the cold), it was clear they weren't really getting the story they wanted. Only when one of the news reporters found a group of fairly inarticulate teenagers in hooded tops, did they seem happy – and the story duly climbed the pecking order in the news. The kids didn't say anything much, but the image seemed to fit the story the media were after, and the boys were featured in every subsequent news bulletin.

I wouldn’t want to romanticise life in a place like Lower Clapton. Of course there's drug-related crime and like much of Hackney it looks shabby. It needs a tube line rather than bendy buses that block the streets; and in my short experience I found the borough council to be a nightmare – I’m surprised anything gets done there. In general, though, it’s a relaxed and cosmopolitan place to live; most people are friendly; and it’s slightly cheaper than many other places. Hopefully there’s still a nice local in E5.

You see, I never set out to be pub landlord, not even a successful one. It was all meant to be a practice run for something greater. So after three years it was time to call time. I’m living in Bethnal Green now and experiencing life in a very different part of the East End. I still haven’t got my club, though I haven’t given up. I learned a heck of a lot and am much more confident about putting ideas, even my whacky ones, into practice. My trouble is that I need lots of money to do it. So I’m currently taking a rest from my little adventures and doing something sensible. However if anyone out there has a couple of million quid to spare and a sense of adventure, feel free to email me.

Niall Crowley (niall@niallcrowley.co.uk), www.niallcrowley.co.uk/the-eclipse

Return to top

---

© 2004·06