"The Moon Under Water" is a 1946 essay by George Orwell

George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...

, originally published in the Evening Standard

Evening Standard

The Evening Standard, now styled the London Evening Standard, is a free local daily newspaper, published Monday–Friday in tabloid format in London. It is the dominant regional evening paper for London and the surrounding area, with coverage of national and international news and City of London...

, in which he provided a detailed description of his ideal public house

Public house

A public house, informally known as a pub, is a drinking establishment fundamental to the culture of Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. There are approximately 53,500 public houses in the United Kingdom. This number has been declining every year, so that nearly half of the smaller...

, the fictitious Moon Under Water.

Summary

Orwell stipulated ten key points that his perfect London pub should have (his criteria for country pubs being different, but unspecified):

1. The architecture and fittings must be uncompromisingly Victorian
   Victorian era
   The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
   
   .
2. Games, such as darts
   Darts
   Darts is a form of throwing game where darts are thrown at a circular target fixed to a wall. Though various boards and games have been used in the past, the term "darts" usually now refers to a standardised game involving a specific board design and set of rules...
   
   , are only played in the public part of the bar.
3. The pub is quiet enough to talk, with the house possessing neither a radio nor a piano.
4. The barmaids know the customers by name and take an interest in everyone.
5. It sells tobacco and cigarettes, aspirins and stamps, and lets you use the phone.
6. There is a snack counter where you can get liver-sausage sandwiches, mussels (a speciality of the house), cheese, pickles and [...] large biscuits with caraway seeds.
7. Upstairs, six days a week, you can get a good, solid lunch -- for example, a cut off the joint, two vegetables and boiled jam roll—for about three shilling
   Shilling
   The shilling is a unit of currency used in some current and former British Commonwealth countries. The word shilling comes from scilling, an accounting term that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times where it was deemed to be the value of a cow in Kent or a sheep elsewhere. The word is thought to derive...
   
   s.
8. [...] a creamy sort of draught
   Draught beer
   Draught beer is beer served from a cask or a pressurised keg.-History of draught:Until Joseph Bramah patented the beer engine in 1785, beer was served directly from the barrel and carried to the customer. The Old English word for carry was dragen which developed into a series of related words,...
   
    stout
   Stout
   Stout is a dark beer made using roasted malt or barley, hops, water and yeast. Stouts were traditionally the generic term for the strongest or stoutest porters, typically 7% or 8%, produced by a brewery....
   
    [...], and it goes better in a pewter
   Pewter
   Pewter is a malleable metal alloy, traditionally 85–99% tin, with the remainder consisting of copper, antimony, bismuth and lead. Copper and antimony act as hardeners while lead is common in the lower grades of pewter, which have a bluish tint. It has a low melting point, around 170–230 °C ,...
   
   pot.
9. They are particular about their drinking vessels at "The Moon Under Water" and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handleless glass. Apart from glass and pewter mugs, they have some of those pleasant strawberry-pink china ones.
10. [...] You go through a narrow passage leading out of the saloon, and find yourself in a fairly large garden.

Orwell admitted that "to be fair", he did know of a few pubs that almost came up to his ideal, including one that had eight of the mentioned qualities.

The essay finished as follows:

And if anyone knows of a pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio, I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms.

External links

• Link including full text and scans of the original newspaper article