De Hems, liberal London, and a Lust for Life

 

 

Pubs define lives.  I grew up in a pub.  My grandparents were North East pub tenants.  I went there for holidays when my parents were having difficulties for ten years of my childhood. 

 

They’ve been my home and harbour, and have been utterly formative to my identity. 

 

My old Dad, and his old Dad before him, were great frequenters of the alehouse.  It’s a lineage, for good or bad.  Doubtlessly, mostly bad for health.  Years of cigarette smoke, and liver damaging ale and spirits.  But good for the soul.  The pub is escape.  Chat and winks are the coinage of the pub.  But equally, so are comfortable silences – its cultural and inclusive in the very widest sense. 

 

Sure, it’s also partly the drink.  But we aren’t just the sum of a Saxon brewing culture.  Pub goers have a love of the unexpected.  You don’t know who’ll walk through the door.  You never know where the night will end.  The brain will perform amazing synaesthesia - mingling a strange physicality, the warming embers of happiness and a cosy loss of geography.  It’s a lovely, humane, anamnesis.  Almost a magic trick.

 

I moved to London from a part of the North that was bereft of work, economy, and ideas; it had been made an inherently closed culture.  I found life in London.  It was permissive and enabling.  It felt new when I moved here.  Like Adam at the start of Paradise Lost.  It was a mythic London, all history and vivid-colour possibilities in its pubs:  Dickensian Coachyard pubs; ancient dockland pubs; East end murder pubs; arriviste gastropubs; Harlesden Yardie pubs.  Miles of them.  They were inexhaustible.  They still are.  I still see the tube map like a treasure map, with secret dens like hidden emeralds for me to discover.  And it is seemingly self-perpetuating.  If you know every inch of London, by the time you return to the start then you’ll find new pubs, reinvented pubs, rediscovered historical pubs.  Turn your back and there’s a new one. 

 

And of them all, De Hems is one of the best jewels.  It is very special. 

 

The only Dutch pub in London - it’s a very, very lovely place.  The combined histories of the countries, and shared cultures are one thing.  But it’s also a wonderfully elegant place.  It has fabulous beers.  Fine specialist draughts and exotic potions for the connoisseur.  Its as relaxed a place as you’ll find.  Its a European idyll. 

 

There’s a new study that reckons part of the British love of pubs comes from their use as shelters during wars - notably, the blitz of WW2.  Maybe that true –the Dutch resistance met here in WWII.  But De Hems wears its history lightly.  It is one of my favourite pubs in the whole world. 

 

And almost unbelievably, the pub is becoming our sponsors and friends.  I’m absolutely delighted.  Watching the England v Switzerland game there a few days ago I thought of the Dutch painter Van Gogh.  In the 1956 film “Lust for Life” Van Gogh was pictured as a visionary genius, very unsuccessful during his lifetime - he was tormented; a misfit.  And I looked over to the bar and saw Mike Yates smiling, like a big daft sunflower.

 

 

Harvey

During Euro 2004