Pickled in Good Company
I’m listening to Jorge Ben on the train. The way I’m dressed indicates three years of Bristol: needless necktie, ill-fitting shirt, horrible jeans, lopsided beret. In the window of my local commuter line, I’m so cool that it almost disgusts me. What’s caused this high? Why am I a little cartoon boy with lollipop and propellor hat, and not someone gagging at their own pretention?
This time, the train is sweeping me from Essex back to Bristol. I could not make this brief trip without giving in to Yas’ insistence that we go to Hackney. It’s our special place, after all.
It always starts the same way. We grab tiny pre-mixed cocktail cans from the M&S at Stratford, we get the Overground, we set up in St John’s Churchyard: in my case, I try not to salivate at the aromatic smoke coming from the market stalls. There was a moment of sadness as I registered that the Hackney Tap has been possessed by a Gail’s. It wasn’t a great pub at all, and I only visited once. It’s still sad to see a pub go.
After my tinnie had sufficiently disarmed me, we head down Mare Street to the Cock Tavern. I love this place for its eclectic pickled eggs and for its local patrons. All the conversations sound beautiful, and remind me that whilst I love the South West, it’s the East End and Essex that I want to hear. It’s home. Every interaction with the bar staff here affirms me that these people are well looked after, too. The interior is dark and cosy and strewn with posters for local gigs. There’s a patch of wall stamped with regional coasters. A wonky lamp in the corner is so proud to be what it is.
I opted for a rhubarb mead. It was too sweet for my tastes, but I inflicted it upon myself in the name of adventure and dutifully chased it with menthol rollies. We chose the roadside tables over the seating area out back: whilst not exactly a sun trap, it was nice to be an island around which Hackney’s pedestrians moved. People walked by and greeted us. Cars held up in traffic blasted kind of incredible music. I stared down Yas’ cider and chili pickled egg and felt envy on a molecular level. There has never been a worse time to be full up from sushi-to-go.
The Cock Tavern advertise an egg-eating competition. I’ve entertained the idea of competing, just to say I’ve done it, although – and this is the same reason I resent pub golf – why wouldn’t I savour such a curious orb? The pickled egg is the briny manifestation of everything freaky and wonderful about British pub snack culture. I’m not here to be an athlete: I will, however, be running back to Mare Street as soon as my schedule allows.
Which came first? Where my Hackney itinerary is concerned, it tends to be the egg. And then the Chesham.
The Chesham Arms is so perfect that I always feel somewhat guilty for going there. We joined the small crowd scattered around its entrance. You know a neighbourhood boozer is good when people are stood there ten minutes before it opens.
Through a suitably residential-looking front door, the Chesham’s bar area greets you first, furthering the effect of stumbling in. There is no preamble, just a bar, and then the warm seating areas blooming from its perimeter. This pub really feels like a place you just happen upon. Beyond this love-at-first-sight kind of spontaneity, it then has the unfortunate effect of rendering the next pub you visit incomparable.
It was nineteen degrees and sunny – thankfully, the Chesham opens out from a small balcony onto a spacious pub garden. The benches in the main section are arranged in sociable rows, the way I like it. Delighted, I watched as two once-separate parties at the neighbouring table were united by mutual eavesdropping. Curious toddlers enjoyed the company of yuppies’ teddy-bear dogs. It was time to drink to the beauty of it all.
Yas is classy: she went for a Campari soda. Its bitterness cut deliciously through the haze of a tipsy East London sojourn. I went for a pint of Seacider, which is cloudy and made with pure apple juice. That is, for better or for worse, all you can taste. As such, my recommendation comes with a warning. Seacider retains none of the innocence of the cheerfully branded carton its fruitiness anticipates. It wants to sweep you away until you’re a mere barnacle on the underside of a wooden bench. If it weren’t for the cat I had to go home and feed, I would be the first barnacle to publish a blog post. Do you like to be beside the seaside?
I munched on scampi fries as I let Yas grill me about questionable romantic interests from my teenage years. If my choice of cider is a useful metric, which it is, I’d like to think my tastes have grown far more refined.
The Chesham Arms is romantic. It’s tucked away, to some extent: “Remember when we found that pub?”. There are more secluded tables towards the back of its sizeable garden space. And it helps that Mehetabel Road is itself a talking point, what with its aspirational townhouses and classic cars.
This romance is not without its footnotes. You can’t talk about Hackney without talking about how Hackney has changed. I tell my East Ender Dad about this pub, and he goes “yeah, I know exactly where that is”, thumbing through neighbourhoods on Google Maps with bullet-precision before mentioning a distant, dangerous vision of Dalston.
Down the road in Newham, entire communities were gutted so that a sweaty, corporate patisserie of national pride could barge in. The Olympics and a Gail’s have little in common: they do, however, belong to a slick project of convenience and hybrid work that is decidedly the legacy of a few guys in Spandex doing laps around an iron doughnut.
Someone on Reddit describes Hackney ‘as a kind of Disneyland for people in their 20s’. Although a light-hearted and woefully general description of a historically diverse area, it holds sickening truth. You go here to work. You go here to club. Someone in your life tells you how badly you need to go to Dalston Superstore. You’re middle class, and you don’t even live here. What now?
In any argument you make about protecting informal community spaces, you should consider the absurdity of the perspectives of hybrid work, or the flexibility afforded by broadly unaffordable higher education. These are the pillars of regeneration projects like HereEast, itself a few Overground stops away. Concrete and conferences and glass. A workday in a snowglobe occupying the cavity of a demolished housing estate: these developments distort – or even obscure – the reality of thousands of Hackney households enduring temporary accommodation.
The severity of Hackney’s housing crisis remains. Social housing provisions are failing to meet the demands of a waitlist. The Olympics can largely be blamed for the area’s inflation problem. In celebrating the preservation of a pub – a place dependent on its patrons – we need to consider how, or if, these patrons are able to exist in proximity to it.
The pub represents somewhere to bed down and talk. It’s a space for informal community socialisation, and so everything about it is in defiance of the convenient or corporate. Embracing the passing visitor is a given in hospitality, but any discussion of a pub you like should account for how that pub serves devoted locals. I was both saddened and delighted to find out that the Chesham Arms operates today thanks to the efforts of campaigners who saved it from illegal conversion in 2015. This was a two-year battle for a very, very old boozer. Hackney loves this pub; they were willing to fight for it. This conviction is perhaps what I saw in the late afternoon crowd scattered around its front door. Statistics surrounding the unaffordability of East London housing and the prevalence of unstable temporary accommodation suggest that this conviction is not so generously offered to the housing crisis.
That’s not to say efforts aren’t being made. The Morning Lane People’s Space campaign operates in light of Hackney Council’s unjust purchase of a site occupied by a big Tesco. Feign shock as I tell you that their intentions were to fill the space with unaffordable private properties. MOPS activists consult locals, who call for social housing, stress the convenience of a big supermarket, and demand youth amenities. Their surveys are far more rigorous than those of the Council, and operate on the ground: stalls outside the big Tesco directly engage the people using it. As of April 2025, Hackney Council claim that they “are committed to involving the Hackney Central community in the plans for the site”. This has yet to be reflected. Still: it’s worth celebrating the sustained efforts of this group, who should not have to pick up the Council’s slack and emphasise the obvious – people want affordable homes, and somewhere to get food.
My reluctant departures from my favourite East London pubs affirm a few things. Chiefly, that this is a place of tension. Often, I have experiences here that obscure – perhaps by design – the fraught relationship that Hackney has with looking after its own residents. I have a dreamy, train-window lens on things that is both enriching and detrimental. That’s not to say I approach every pub visit with a morosely critical lens. It’s all about balance. I sink pints, I come home, and I think about the more miserable things. Business and pleasure.
