The Moon Under Water

:"This article is about the George Orwell essay. For the Ryan Cabrera album, see The Moon Under Water (album).

The Moon Under Water was a 1946 essay by George Orwell. In the essay, which was published in the Evening Standard, Orwell provided a detailed explanation of the perfect pub, the fictitious [http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=11826680] 'Moon Under Water'. The essay became the basis upon which the Wetherspoons chain of pubs were built and a number of them have adopted the name.

Orwell stipulated ten key points that his perfect London pub should have (his criteria for country pubs being different, but unspecified).

# The pub's architecture and fittings must be uncompromisingly Victorian.
# Games, such as darts, are only played in the public part of the bar; the saloon bar, ladies' bar, bottle-and-jug bar, and upstairs dining room.
# The pub is quiet enough to talk, with the house possessing neither a radio nor a piano.
# The barmaids know the customers by name and take an interest in everyone.
# It sells tobacco and cigarettes, aspirins and stamps, and lets you use the phone.
# There is a snack counter where you can get liver-sausage sandwiches, mussels (a specialty of the house), cheese, pickles and [...] large biscuits with caraway seeds.
# Upstairs, six days a week, you can get a good, solid lunch -- for example, a cut off the joint, two vegetables and boiled jam roll -- for about three shillings.
# [...] draught stout with it [...] It is a creamy sort of stout, and it goes better in a pewter pot.
# They are particular about their drinking vessels at "The Moon Under Water" and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handleless glass. Apart from glass and pewter mugs, they have some of those pleasant strawberry-pink china ones.
# [...] You go through a narrow passage leading out of the saloon, and find yourself in a fairly large garden.

He wrote that he did not know of any pubs that had more than eight of these combined in the one location.

External links

* [http://www.whitebeertravels.co.uk/orwell Link including full text and scans of the newspaper article]
* [http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=11826680 Still the Moon Under Water] Economist.com Jul 28th 2008