On drinking at work(London Office culture 1970s-2020s)
Much has been made of the photo of Johnson and others drinking wine in a Downing St garden on 15th May 2020 and now of the BYOB party on 20th May. If it was socialising it was breaking the then lockdown law. If as the Tories claim they were work meetings perhaps it wasn’t. Sue Grey, a civil servant, is investigating.
There are also reports of parties at Downing St in April 2021 days before the funeral of Prince Philip. I doubt the two were related and those of us who are not fans of the monarchy were,it may be recalled, keen to keep mourning within reasonable limits. In addition it may also be recalled that necessary as the early 2021 lockdown was until vaccines could be rolled out it probably went on too long and too restrictively with tiered restrictions and lengthy periods between changes.
That brings us back to two key points. Firstly whatever was thought about the early 2021 lockdown it was the law and you wouldnt expect it to be broken (and the police to ignore it) at Downing St. Secondly the idea of a party at the workplace itself is out of time as I explain below.
As a management veteran of central London office culture I’d say that in 2020 it seems unlikely that alcohol was consumed at a work meeting. That practice for a variety of reasons has long gone. Firstly because its not inclusive. Lots of people don’t drink and don’t want to be in a drinking environment. Offices are no longer the preserve of clean shaven white men in suits (alright I was never clean shaven and never wore a suit myself..) Secondly if you are actually doing serious work drinking does not help.
In short things have changed. I started office work in 1979 (for the same employer I’m still working for). My early managerial years were spent at the old HQ of the (then) London telephone region, 87 Albert Embankment SE1. There was a bar on the 11th floor that opened between 12-2 should one feel like a lunchtime pint or two. In the days before the interwebs and mobiles while you definitely had to attend the office to prove you were working you didn’t have to stay there. Placing the jacket on the back of the chair and leaving some papers on the desk was sufficient. Hence many afternoons were spent in the pub. If anything that serious came up a clerical messenger was despatched from the office to find you.
The senior manager I worked to in those days was a friend of John Young owner of Youngs Brewery and from time to time a cask of Youngs would be tapped in the office to mark some occasion or other.
I cant place exactly when the tradition of office drinking stopped (for the reasons mentioned above) in London (it was certainly later elsewhere) but I think as the older wartime generation who were the mainstays of it retired. By the later 1990s it had gone.
That doesn’t mean to say that workplace drinking in the environs of the office not in it doesn’t still go on, but its definitively after work and given working hours in central London offices(when people are there) that might mean 6pm or after. Drinking in the office, at least outside of some official function (and even then increasingly rare) might be a disciplinary offence in many large offices.
Of course it might be argued that the Tories and Tory culture is stuck in the 1950s and so work drinking may still survive. If so they are even worse than I thought….
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