Dear Londoners — Across the capital, a change is afoot. Where once watching the footie might've cost you the bus fare and the (not inconsiderable) price of a couple of shandies, London's pubs are now charging £20 — and have a complex advance ticketing system to boot. And they aren't alone. Across the city, more and more venues are charging for events you might once have expected to be free, with bars and boozers gradually changing into fully fledged events venues.
But why? What drives someone to pay £50 to watch England lose? And what makes it all link back to Boxpark Shoreditch? In today's dispatch, Peter joined the pint-chucking, Jude-Bellingham-lookalike-hunting masses in a bid to find out.
How did it come to this? On a scorching hot Wednesday, I find myself at the Jude Bellingham lookalike competition at Shoreditch Boxpark, thinking bitterly about my career choices as a swarm of PR people palm me warm lemonades and Pablo Escobar branded nicotine pouches.
The event, predictably, is a special kind of hell; the kind of place to send war criminals, or grown men who loudly watch reels on the overground. A scrum of young mixed race men (none of whom looked especially like Jude Bellingham) in white T-shirts are coralled into a green astro-turf pen to be judged in 30°C heat, an indignity compensated for by the prize of £1,966 in Deliveroo vouchers.
As a swarm of content creators descend, the first people who’ve booked tickets to watch England play Argentina begin to arrive. They’ve paid up to £50 for their tickets. Morons, I think. Who would spend that kind of money to watch the football?
An increasing number of us, it would appear. The joyous collective mania of England’s World Cup run has now dissipated, vanished into that hot Atlanta air. But watching the World Cup in London this year crystallised a few ways that the city has changed for good, and how socialising in the capital has become larger and commercialised.
Viral roof smashing
In the end, I watched the ill-fated England game at a crowded pub in Exmouth market, in the time-honoured tradition of rocking up a couple hours early to elbow my way into a standing view of the TV. But as I’d hunted for a suitable venue earlier that day, more and more venues seemed to take on the order and artifice of Boxpark — that open-air food market which began life in Shoreditch in 2011 before rapidly becoming the colosseum of viral pint-hurling it's known as today.
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