Crooked Olde England

Burning pubs, Reformation adiaphora, and a case for evangelical nostalgia

The Burning of the Crooked House. 

It sounds like an Agatha Christie novel. In fact, it’s one of the UK’s stories of the summer. 

Set in the Black Country, The Crooked House was Britain’s wonkiest pub. Dating back to 1765, the building became a public house in 1830 and, not long after that, began its journey into lopsidedness, thanks to subsidence caused by heavy local mining. Rather than being demolished, it was simply propped up with a few buttresses. And quite right too—if it’s good enough for a cathedral, it’s good enough for the local watering hole. 

In late July this year, however, the pub was sold and was apparently unlikely to reopen. A week later, a fire gutted the place. The remaining brickwork was then demolished with eyebrow raising swiftness in an apparent violation of planning laws. Skullduggery seems afoot. The police are treating the fire as arson. Large piles of soil apparently blocked fire crews’ access on the night of the blaze. What’s more, the pub’s new owners have been exposed as property developers, with links to a previous major fire.

The tale—and it is truly a tale now, not a mere story—has caught the national imagination. It is the tale of the death of an England—an England imagined to be as pleasantly crooked as this old pub.

We picture it as a land of quirk and character, in a time before the straight lines and right angles and chrome and glass of modernity. A time when manual labourers went to work in shirts and peak caps and then retired to places like The Crooked House to drink pints of dark-brown, room temperature beer from dimpled glasses with handles, in a saloon full of dozens of people who they actually knew by name. 

This whole world, not just certain buildings in it, had a certain crookedness to it—a more wild and unmanageable unpredictability, especially socially. It had a greater cheek-by-jowl, “thrown togetherness”, where the spheres of home and labour and village bled messily into one another and were not really spheres at all. It’s a far cry from our profoundly uncrooked social present, where we need never speak to or share space with anonymous neighbours, shop employees, or delivery drivers. We can separate ourselves from them with rigid lines, aggressively policed by buffering technologies.

Appropriate responses to such visions of a past England are carefully moderated. We are allowed to pine for that world to a certain degree—enough to sustain an industry of luxury cottages and AirBnBs in places where such anachronistic morsels of history have managed to cling on. We are permitted to revel in it for a little while, just long enough to stop off at The Crooked House for a pint and an Instagram post.

But to pine for this world any more seriously than that, to argue that its loss represents an aggregate national decline, and to suggest that this amounts to a deep and still-bleeding spiritual wound on the nation, is to invite derision. “Romantic”, “luddite”, “reactionary”, “nostalgic”—these terms get lobbed in your direction, and you start a rapid two-step to avoid the charge. 

I was, however, liberated of this evasive instinct several months ago when Paul Kingsnorth opened one of his articles with the words “My name is Paul and I am a nostalgic.”

Nostalgics Anonymous it is then: my name is Rhys and I, too, am a nostalgic.