2001 The connection between literature and the public house is honourable. The first great vernacular poem in the language, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, opens in a Southwark hostelry, the Tabard. Inspirational as its conviviality is in some cases, pubs – and the booze they serve – are sometimes inimical to the production of literature. The inebriated muse rarely produces masterpieces. Probably more good poetry was lost than conceived in the Wagon and Horses, known as the ‘Glue Pot’ because once you went in you were stuck all day, where the BBC poets – Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice, Roy Campbell, W.R. Rodgers – liked to drink their day away.
On the whole, though, authors are solidly behind their local. On this day it was reported that the Booker-winning novelist Dame Antonia Byatt had joined battle against the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in support of hers.
The Minster school, which trained the choir of Lincoln Cathedral, had acquired the adjoining site on Lindum Hill, on which was situated Lincoln’s oldest pub, the Adam and Eve – named after mankind’s first sinners – a nicely ironic tavern sign. Having bought the property from the brewery which owned it, the Church Schools Company (whose patrons are the country’s two archbishops) intended to take over the pub’s gardens for its own purposes, de-license the listed building and convert the shell of what was once the pub into a student hostel. No more cakes and ale at the Adam and Eve.
A.S. Byatt learned about this desecration (it could hardly, in the circumstances, be called ‘sacrilege’) from the American film star Gwyneth Paltrow, who had starred in the recent film adaptation of Possession (1990). The Adam and Eve had been a location for scenes in the movie.
Dame Antonia, whose novel was set around Lincoln, and who had been brought up herself not far away, made her views publicly known: ‘I would be very upset if the pub closed. I have known it since I was a child. In places like Lincoln, where there isn’t much left, it really ought to be left alone.’
Happily, the Adam and Eve pub survived. It supports (under a medallion of the city’s most famous literary personage, Alfred Lord Tennyson) the annual Lincoln Beer Festival.