The Moon Under Water – the synopsis of the Ideal Pub

My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights. 

George Orwell (or Eric Arthur Blair if you prefer) loved a good pint, and his eulogy to an ideal pub still lives on in the High Street around us today.

In homage to Orwell, J D Wetherspoon’s has used the name Moon Under Water for 15 of its outlets (at the last count):

He once remarked that he models his pubs on a description in a 1946 essay by George Orwell of the imaginary Moon Under Water, which offered cheap beer, good conversation, motherly barmaids and solid architecture.

– Tim Martin, Chairman in an interview with The Guardian

Of course, George Orwell was well known for words which have entered popular culture. Ironically, the role of Newspeak, the language he invented for ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, was to reduce the meaning of language in order to make it easier for The Party to control the thoughts of the people; e.g. ‘bad’ becomes ‘ungood’, ‘better’ becomes ‘plusgood’…..etc

However, let’s leave the topic of Newspeak for another blog – the point here is that for Orwell, the pub was the ultimate expression of freewill, a place where people could come together, exchange ideas, gossip, be individuals.

Even more ironic then that The Moon Under Water never actually existed…..

But now is the time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place as the Moon Under Water.

That is to say, there may well be a pub of that name, but I don’t know of it, nor do I know any pub with just that combination of qualities.

 –George Orwell, The Moon Under Water