You’ve probably seen the discourse by now. But if you haven’t: A recent viral TikTok captioned “pints, chit-chat and good people” by content creator Max Lepage-Keefe, containing autumnal fashion-y men drinking and chatting outside The Blue Posts in Soho, has ground an entire cross-section of Britain’s gears. It’s becoming something of a lightning rod and has been likened to the infamous Fitzroy garage party and the Birmingham tight-jean lads.
But this isn’t the only TikTok featuring the drinking spot that’s gone viral and pissed people off. A compilation clip titled “London pub culture” –featuring even more fashion-adjacent people laughing, drinking and posing at The Blue Posts – is now on 754,000 views, and the comments are almost all uniformly negative. “Specific niche influencer meet up culture!” reads one; “this is just Soho rich kids man,” says another.
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By our count, this makes The Blue Posts one of Britain’s most commented-on and controversial pubs – or at least the epicentre of the universe for your @sockshousemeeting types. But I wanted to get beyond the anger of the internet. Is The Blue Posts really crawling with Lollapalooza 94’ cosplayers? What do its patrons make of all the noise and nonsense? What happened to pickled onions and feeling slightly scared – is this really London pub culture?
“Just a bunch of guys standing up outside a pub. I didn’t see anything controversial,” a non-fashion, non-“pints and chit chat” guy tells VICE after viewing the TikTok, stood outside the pub in question. It’s a brisk, damp-ish lunchtime in Soho, and there are only two guys standing outside drinking. “I mean, there was literally nothing that transpired other than some people standing up outside of the pub, as far as I could see.”
Now, it’s true that the people depicted in both TikToks are not your typical old-man-and-his-dog types. Not all areas or pubs are the same, and quite clearly, Soho isn’t representative of all of London, which appears to be the central – and flawed – claim of the compilation clip. But on the afternoon I visit, the vibe of the people standing outside is definitely pretty normal, not like the people glimpsed on TikTok. The cohort inside is even older.
“I mean, it’s not strange to me. I think a lot of people want to take videos and it’s aesthetic for them. I don’t see anything wrong with it,” says 18-year-old barista Antea Kardum Valach, from Slovakia.
“But I see what people mean when they say, ‘Oh, he just put the phone there and [is pretending] not to think about it.’ But I don’t think it really matters.”
Was there anything about the lads’ look that might explain the vitriol? “It’s really British to me, but I think the outfits were normal,” Valach says. (Let the record state that Valach was dressed in a dark mac with a fluffy cream scarf and maroon hoodie – hard to tell because it’s cold, but she could be somewhat fashion-adjacent herself.)
I speak to the pub’s bartender of two-and-a-half years, Champagne – not her real name, obv – Lorraine. “I didn’t understand it to start with, somebody had to explain to me what was going on,” Lorraine says of the TikTok. “I can’t see really what all the fuss was about.” Lorraine says she later found out the TikTok is actually a riff on a video made by the pub’s owner, Martin Ashley.
“This is a pretty iconic pub. In Soho, it’s so well-known,” she says. “It hasn’t really changed much since the 80s. It’s got that very old-school ambiance that people love – it’s like going into a pub that you went into with your mum and dad.”
Lorraine has been working at the Blue Posts for two and a half years. I wonder to what extent pub culture’s changed for someone in their middle age, and whether those videos are just a symptom of it.
“The pub used to be a place where people would meet meet other people,” she muses. “I think that’s changing now and there’s lots of reasons for that – certainly the cost of going out and having a few drinks as well, particularly in London. It’s not cheap. Certainly for younger people, they’ve missed out on perhaps the aspect of pub culture that people like myself had.”
Dr Niki Cheong, a lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London, notes that pubs in England are governed by “societal rules and dynamics”, citing Watching The English by anthropologist Kate Fox. “You behave in a particular way in a pub, and recording yourself seemingly ignoring the fact that you’re recording yourself appears to have broken some of these rules,” Cheong previously told VICE. Which sounds right: When you enter a pub, you are participating in a sacral expression of British culture – generations of swift ones and cheeky ones have gone before you.
These men, as in that look and vibe – perhaps me included – are somewhat ubiquitous in London. It’s possible their aesthetic and decision to film the pub while not acknowledging the camera simply annoys people because of what it represents, not because of who or what they are specifically. But to the haters, perhaps it says you can’t just be anymore; everything has to be a product; an inauthentic expression of something entirely normal. Why not just “live normally,” as one TikToker says about the videos?
I find two more young lads drinking outside The Blue Posts and ask them about the TikTok. “I think it went viral because ordinarily like it’s cool to watch. I sent it to people because I thought it was cool. We literally do that. You know, it’s enjoyable,” says Sam, 22, dressed in a black puffer and those trendy wide-legged olive-green trousers that one in three men in South London seem to own.
Why did it piss people off? “It might be jealousy. It could be the kinds of people that they look like they were – the way they dress,” Sam says. “I don’t think about that, though. I think it’s all a lot of rubbish. If people are cool and they’re enjoying themselves, why not?”
I posit that maybe on some level people want pubs to remain old-man pubs, because the British condition is to actively shoot down nice things, and anything new and fancy just sort of riles people up. “That’s stupid, isn’t it? Everyone was young at some point. Then again,” Sam adds, “surely the people that are commenting aren’t old men.”
Some of the comments on both videos seemed to assume the people in them are middle class, coopting the behaviours and presentation of the working class, including the distressed workwear and farmer country-core present in Lepage-Keefe’s video. (For the record, the creator has dismissed the wealthy claim, telling the News Movement that he actually works two jobs.) “I don’t particularly mind young fashionistas but this is not an accurate representation of London pub culture at all,” one person posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“If it’s in the middle of Soho, you can’t say that it needs to be old men. I mean, in Soho, there are barely any older people, it’s all young people. Everyone that works here, they’re obviously young,” Sam says.
Both Sam and his 22-year-old mate Matt agree that a lot of people just chime in on social media for the sake of it. “If you’re gonna put it up, you know you’re gonna get hate on something,” Sam says.
“You need to protect pub culture as well,” Matt, also from south London, adds. “You have a good day, you go for a pint; you have a shit day, you go for a pint.” And of course, he’s right. That camaraderie, that comfort blanket of an institution is what the pub is all about, regardless of what you’re wearing and what you choose to record on your phone.
And it is a good pub, this one, whether or not you want to fight the next gassed-up zoomer in loafers and a tank top who walks through the door. As I speak to Lorraine behind the bar, she gestures to all the furnishings and touches that make the pub look old and dated. The pub’s got that old-school red patterned carpet. There is a dusty bottle of Dom Pérignon above the bar that looks like it’s been there since the 80s, but has in reality only been there a couple of years.
At the end of my time at The Blue Posts, Lorraine says I can come back for a drink on the house – because they still believe in hospitality, which does make me feel a special kind of way. An old man at the bar jokes that he’d make a video too, if you paid him.
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