A Name from the Augustan Age
The Sir Richard Steele pub, on Haverstock Hill at the edge of Belsize Park, carries the name of one of the most significant figures in the history of English journalism and polite letters. Sir Richard Steele, born in Dublin in 1672 and educated at Charterhouse and Oxford alongside his lifelong collaborator Joseph Addison, was the co-founder of The Tatler (1709) and The Spectator (1711-12), the periodicals that effectively invented the form of the literary magazine and shaped English prose style and social manners for generations. His connections to the Hampstead area — he lived in Hampstead at various points during his eventful career — gave the pub that bears his name a biographical justification that many pub names lack.
Steele and Addison together transformed English literary culture in the early eighteenth century. Where the prose of the previous century had been characterised by either scholarly pedantry or journalistic roughness, The Spectator and The Tatler developed a prose style that was simultaneously accessible and refined, morally serious and socially entertaining — a prose style that could address a broad literate public without condescending to it. The fictional character of Mr Spectator, who observes London society with a combination of amusement and moral reflection, established a mode of cultural commentary that would influence English prose writing from Addison and Steele's own time through to the essayists of the twentieth century.
Steele's life was as eventful as his journalism. He was a soldier before he was a writer, serving in the army and rising to the rank of captain before turning his attention to the theatre and then to periodical journalism. He was a Member of Parliament, serving for various constituencies and engaging in the political controversies of the early eighteenth century with the same vigour he brought to his literary work. He was married twice, the second time to a Welsh heiress named Mary Scurlock — to whom he wrote letters of unusual tenderness and self-revelation — and he lived, throughout his life, in the kind of financial disorder that seems to have been endemic among the men of letters of his era.
The Augustan Literary World
The literary world in which Steele moved — the world of the coffee houses, the periodicals, the pamphlets, and the emerging institutions of public literary debate — was in many ways the ancestor of the NW3 literary world that the pub now serves. The coffee houses of early eighteenth-century London, where Addison, Steele, Swift, Pope, and their contemporaries gathered to discuss literature, politics, and the affairs of the day, served a social function not entirely unlike that of the literary pubs of Belsize Park in the mid-twentieth century: they provided a venue for the informal exchange of ideas, for the formation of literary alliances and rivalries, for the collective maintenance of a literary community through the social rituals of conversation and debate.
The difference, of course, is that the coffee house world of Addison and Steele was almost exclusively male — women were not admitted to the major coffee houses, and the public sphere of literary debate was effectively closed to them. The literary pubs of the twentieth century were, in principle if not always in practice, open to both sexes, and the women writers of the NW3 community — Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing, and others — found in the pub a social space that their Augustan predecessors could not have accessed.
The connection between the Augustan literary tradition and the NW3 literary community is more than merely nominal. The ideal of the polite, morally serious, socially engaged literary essayist — the ideal that Addison and Steele embodied and disseminated — had a long afterlife in English literary culture, influencing the essayists and critics who continued to write for the periodicals and literary magazines that sustained the literary culture of Hampstead and Belsize Park. The tradition of the essay as a form of public moral reflection, accessible to the educated general reader rather than the specialist, is a tradition that runs in an unbroken line from The Spectator through to the literary journalism of the twentieth century.
The Pub as Community Hub
Whatever its historical resonances, the Sir Richard Steele pub functions primarily as a community local — a neighbourhood pub whose regulars come not primarily for its literary associations but for the beer, the company, and the particular social comfort that a well-run local provides. In a neighbourhood as densely populated and as socially diverse as Belsize Park, the local pub serves an important social function: it is one of the few spaces in the neighbourhood where residents from different professional and social backgrounds mix with some degree of regularity, where the social segregation of residential life is temporarily dissolved by the shared experience of sitting at adjacent tables in the same room.
The community character of the Sir Richard Steele has been expressed in various ways over the years: in its support for local causes and events, in the informal networks of mutual knowledge and assistance that its regular customers maintain, in its role as a information exchange for local news and community matters that would otherwise be difficult to circulate in a neighbourhood of largely private residential life. The pub in this role is not a political institution or a cultural venue in the formal sense, but a social infrastructure, a piece of the neighbourhood's connective tissue that holds together its diverse elements in ways that more formal institutions cannot.
Literature and Local Life
The literary name of the Sir Richard Steele is not merely incidental to its character. In a neighbourhood that has housed an extraordinary concentration of writers, artists, and intellectuals over the past century, a pub named for a founding father of English literary journalism carries a self-awareness about its own cultural context that a more generically named pub would not. The name invites a kind of reflection on the history of the neighbourhood and its relationship to the literary culture of the city — not in a pretentious or self-congratulatory way, but as a quiet acknowledgement that this is a place where the literary tradition is felt to matter.
The writers who have drunk at the Sir Richard Steele over the years — and there have been many, given its position in a neighbourhood that has housed more writers per square mile than almost anywhere else in the English-speaking world — have been engaging, knowingly or unknowingly, with a tradition that connects them to the founding figures of English literary journalism. The conversation at the bar is connected, across three centuries of English prose, to the conversation in the coffee houses where Addison and Steele first developed the form of the literary magazine that would eventually produce all the literary journalism that has been written in and about NW3.
A Pub for All Seasons
The Sir Richard Steele, like all good neighbourhood pubs, is most itself in its most ordinary moments: a weekday lunchtime when the regulars exchange the news of the neighbourhood, a Friday evening when the professional residents of Belsize Park decompress after the working week, a Sunday afternoon when the Heath walkers stop for a pint before the journey home. In these ordinary moments, the pub's historical and literary associations are entirely invisible, submerged beneath the immediate social reality of people engaged in the most human of activities: eating, drinking, and talking to each other.
This ordinariness is not a failure of the pub's cultural ambitions but their fulfilment. The Augustan ideal that Steele and Addison embodied — the ideal of polite letters in service of social life, of literary culture as a vehicle for the improvement of manners and the enrichment of social intercourse — was always an ideal in service of the ordinary social life of civilised people. The pub that bears Steele's name serves this ideal, in its modest way, by providing the kind of civilised social space in which good conversation and good company can flourish without requiring any particular literary sophistication from those who participate in them.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London’s most remarkable neighbourhoods.*