Do we really need another Irish pub?

“Jack, I’ve got another idea,” I say down the phone. “How soon can you get to Liverpool?” 

My editor slurs, a cocktail of dread and minor alcohol toxicity impeding his response. “Laurence, I can’t do another seafood restaurant,” he says. “Not after last time. I haven’t even looked at a boiled egg since.”

“This is nothing like that,” I snap. “They’ve gone and opened another bloody Irish bar.”

“I’m on my way”.

Record scratch. Freeze frame. Like Jack, you’re probably wondering why I’m so animated. 

Well, to misappropriate a phrase, a Merseysider with a grievance is seldom mistaken for a ray of sunshine. Add alcohol to the mix and you could have a veritable Ice Age on your hands, especially when it comes to the repurposing of favoured or nostalgic establishments around the city. 

So it is with this frosty reception that many “concept pubs” around Liverpool are greeted — at least, in comment sections and social media posts. To many, the antlered deformities that spring freely from the imagination of 1936 PubCo owner Rob Gutmann are the nadir of Liverpool’s drinking culture: we want to conduct our liver damage in dignified silence, not surrounded by antwacky wood panelling and bathed in tasteful, low-key acoustic playlists. To others, however, his eccentric, usually reasonably priced creations are a welcome addition to the boozer scene for their diverse beer selection alone, and are at least utilising spaces that would otherwise be deconsecrated for “luxury” flats or student accommodation. The sight of St Peter’s Tavern on a sunny Friday, the former Catholic church’s cloister garths overspilling with sunglassed patrons sipping pilsner, could almost be a vision of Heaven. 

But even if you do believe Rob Gutmann to be Satan incarnate, I’m here to tell you that your theology is askew. Look not for the tapered goatee, prominent brow and preoccupation with horned and cloven-hoofed taxidermy: today’s Devil is far less visible. In fact, the fiend I’m thinking of has a stranglehold on Liverpool’s nightlife that makes Rob’s grip look like a friendly if unsolicited neck massage. I speak, of course, of the Pub Invest Group (PIG). 

PIG’s owners, JSM Company Group, are not just a pub landlord: they currently hold a portfolio of over 150 investment properties, many of which will be familiar to readers across the North West. These include Mock Tudor facades on West Kirby’s Crescent and Chester’s Foregate Street, terracotta Gothic towers on Dale Street, and classical temples on Castle Street and Chester’s Pepper Street. JSM own the Fruit Exchange; Hanover House above the Epstein Theatre; Cavern Walks; and Baker House, the corner building on Button Street where the legendary Probe Records once was. They claim to possess over sixty apartments in the city centre. They’re the landlords for Burger King on Speke Road, the Tesco’s on Allerton Road, and even — judging by their website — 1936 Pub Co group in St Peter’s Tavern. They probably collect rent on his pearly gates, too. 

Not content with owning half of Liverpool, PIG/JSM has sowed its oats all over the city’s nightlife and bar culture. If you’ve had a few pints in the city centre over the last fifteen years, chances are you’ve contributed to this burgeoning empire. Some of these are misappropriations of once-legendary venues: Electrik on Seel Street, for instance, was once the mighty Krazy House, and K1 Metal Club a few doors down was inspired by “the Kray”’s mythic first floor. Meanwhile, Eric’s on Mathew Street is not the Eric’s where Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes once cut their musical teeth but a crucial component of Yesterdayism, the pissweak nostalgia branding to entice middle-aged locals to part with their pennies and from their sense of historical context. Heebie Jeebies, once a cornerstone of Liverpool’s clubbing and live music ecosystem, is also just another JSM leisure trademark. 

PIG’s pen of pubs also include Temple Tavern and McCooley's on Mathew Street; the Irish House and the Celtic Corner on Ranelagh; Kells of Eden on Fleet Street; the Dubliner on Temple Court; another bloody McCooley's on Concert Square; Nelly Foley's on Great Charlotte Street; and Dirty O'Shea's on Seel Street.

You may have noticed that many of these titles have a Hibernian flavour. Now, I’m probably the only Catholic on Merseyside with negligible Irish ancestry; nevertheless, I have an abiding fascination with Irish culture, from the comic novels of Flann O’Brien to the raucous folk punk of The Pogues. It is out of this veneration that I tend not to don a floppy Guinness hat and guzzle stout ‘til the kidneys squeak every 17th March, just as I try not to black up on Martin Luther King Jr Day. For the same reasons, I also have an aversion to Irish pubs – by which I mean Irish themed pubs, as opposed to pubs in Ireland itself, which I’ve often found delightful. 

Another rule of thumb I abide by is that nothing good ever happened in a pub that has disco lights on at two o’clock in the afternoon. It is for this reason that several of PIG/JSM’s pubs may never benefit from my patronage: The Celtic Corner and Nelly Foley’s, but also Smokie Mo’s and their stable of vaguely Beatles-themed bars like the King John and Rubber Soul. 

In January, having run another once-celebrated music venue, the Zanzibar, into oblivion, PIG/JSM decided to default to their safe zone and reboot the Seel Street site as yet another Gaelic-styled watering hole: McNasty’s. Where they got the name from, I’ve no idea: there is, Google tells me, a family-run pub of the same name in Aberdeen, and an Irish dive bar in Cardiff. But it more sounds like they asked a paddywhacking racist to name it: one cannot but imagine a cloth hat-wearing, clay pipe-smoking tramp serving pints from the slop tray with a toothless Shane McGowan sneer. 

Then last week, they opened another one, this time in the classical, Grade II-listed Castle Moat House on Fenwick Street: McSwiggin’s. Once again, the imagination reels at what stage-Irish pisshead PIG/JSM had in mind with that name. I’m as English as King Alfred’s favourite tea set, and I still feel offended. 

To investigate these latest hospitality suites/assaults upon the Irish national character, I collected a severely bewildered Jack from Lime Street and frogmarched him to Fenwick Street. 

“Look”, I say, gesturing manically at the former North & South Wales Bank. 

A thirty-foot tricolour hangs between its Corinthian pilasters, as if daring the Queen Victoria statue on Derby Square opposite to just try another potato famine, yeh ow’d geebag. The sign bearing the McSwiggin’s name and its boast to be the “HOUSE OF STOUT” looks like a low-resolution print-out. Incidentally, PIG/JSM also own The Old Bank bar next door.

Less than a week after opening, McSwiggin’s was broken into and unburdened of, according to the owners, around ten-grand worth of stock. I’d like to think this was Liverpool’s immune system rejecting another artificial contaminant, but it was more likely folk on the rob. 

“Let’s just get in out of this sun,” Jack says, picking nervously at his tousled barnet and doubtless wondering why he’s here. 

We do so and pay nearly £14 for two pints of lager. Buckling under the expense, I drink in the atmosphere and decor while the speakers serenade us with obligatory Dubliners ballads. It’s almost like PIG/JSM has taken a page out of Gutmann’s unholy text — there’s even a deer head on the wall by the bar. But instead of filling the wallspace with questionable antique bedpans, they’ve ordered in bespoke furnishings, like a full-size mirror with the new bar’s name printed across in an old-fashioned style. Like Young Earth Creationists’ conception of the known universe, McSwiggan’s has been recently generated but with the appearance of age. 

“It’s sort of, like, nothing, isn’t it?” Jack says, sipping his Harp. (This is actually a Northern Irish beer, perhaps PIG/JSM’s way of signalling their radical commitment to a united Ireland.)

I have to agree. Apart from the prices, and mounds of inauthentic tat, it’s just… fine. We elect to decamp to Seel Street. 

McNasty's is, if anything, even bolder in its bad taste than its Fenwick Street cousin. Behind the bar, another slain ruminant glares down at me, but this time it wears green plastic shades in the shape of two four-leaf clovers. Memories of the Zanzi swelling within me, I can barely stand to be in McNasty’s for too long. Fortunately, there’s a roof terrace; after paying £14.40 this time for two pints of Harp, we head for higher ground. 

Waiting for us is an absurdity: an ostensible Irish pub, replete with dark green upholstery, wooden chairs with balustraded backs, and framed adverts for discontinued whiskies, forgotten stouts and long-since completed racemeets, but no roof. Truth be told, in this weather, I wouldn’t mind staying for a few more, but it’s hard not to think of all the other things I could spend seven quid on — like a full month’s Post subscription.

Accompanying a still-bemused Jack back to Lime Street, I find myself mulling over a tricky question. Who decides what happens to Liverpool’s legacy? Whether that be the city’s ethnic backdrop, cultural influences, architectural heritage or recent social history. 

Perhaps there should be a nighttime czar who oversees these things. And even if one, or maybe two or three, companies are given carte blanche to open whatever they like wherever they have money to do so, should things like history, taste and public interest not be considered? What value is all this adding? And if there’s no way to stop a PubCo or a PIG bevelling another pub into an illustrious building is there nobody to say no: it can’t be yet another fucking Irish bar?

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