LONDON — In or around the late seventeenth century, the coffee house emerged as London's defining social institution: a place of relatively democratic exchange, where merchants and philosophers and occasionally the King's own spies could sit, drink something vaguely energising, and argue about ideas. The coffee house was, historians have suggested, foundational to the Enlightenment. It was also, by all accounts, quite uncomfortable: the benches were hard, the air was thick with smoke and disputation, and you were expected to contribute to the conversation rather than simply exist in the presence of it.
This is to say that London's current enthusiasm for deliberately challenging drinking environments has precedent. It also has an excellent recently-opened case study in Shoreditch, which we shall come to shortly.
First, the cultural analysis.
The "discomfort economy" — a term coined by nobody in particular but used by everyone in marketing since approximately 2019 — refers to the growing commercial sector built around selling people experiences that are challenging, demanding, or mildly unpleasant as a form of deliberate contrast to the ambient comfort of modern urban life. Escape rooms. Cold-water swimming clubs. Ultra-marathons. The CrossFit gym located in a building that appears, from the outside, to be structurally compromised. The restaurant that serves food you don't choose at a price you can't see until the end.
The discomfort economy is, at its core, about earned experience. The thesis is that comfort without contrast becomes invisible; that we stop tasting the food, feeling the warmth, appreciating the rest, because we have never known their absence. To re-sensitise the palate — sensory, emotional, existential — you must first introduce difficulty. The difficulty is not the point. The appreciation that follows the difficulty is the point. The difficulty is the mechanism.
What is unusual about London's current iteration of this economy is that it has moved, with some confidence, into the pub.
The pub is not supposed to be difficult. The pub is, in the British cultural imagination, a sanctuary. It is the place you go when things are difficult, and it makes them less difficult by being warm and familiar and populated by people who are also finding things difficult but have agreed, mutually, not to discuss it directly. The pub has a contract with difficulty, and the contract states that difficulty stays outside. Pubs are soft landings. Pubs are the opposite of challenge.
And yet. Here we are. Doing push-ups at the door of a Shoreditch bar.
The establishment that most fully embodies — and, arguably, has single-handedly created — the London punishment pub genre is BarSparta in Shoreditch, which has been extensively documented in Violet Woolf's definitive report for this publication and which we shall here approach from a slightly different angle: the angle of bewildered cultural historian who is trying to work out whether this is a joke and is becoming increasingly convinced that it is not.
BarSparta, for those who have not yet read Woolf's account — and if you have not, you should; it is one of the finer pieces of pub journalism produced in this city in recent years — is a drinking establishment in Shoreditch modelled, philosophically and aesthetically, on the ancient Spartan city-state. It has no chairs. It requires three push-ups at the door. It serves cocktails with no more than two ingredients. It provides one olive as its light snack, accompanied by a lecture on the relationship between hardship and appreciation. It holds a mandatory collective battle cry at 10:45 PM. Its loyalty programme rewards not just purchases but attitude, with the highest points awarded for complaints submitted in epic poetry.
It has a queue outside on Thursday evenings.
This is the thing that requires explanation. Not the concept — the concept is, in the tradition of all great satirical premises, internally coherent and executed with total commitment. The thing that requires explanation is the queue. Who is in it? What do they want? What does it tell us that this particular offering, in this particular city, at this particular moment, is producing a queue?
Based on Woolf's fieldwork and supplementary observations, we propose the following typology of BarSparta's customer base, presented here in the academic tradition of the completely unverifiable taxonomy:
Type A: The Canary Wharf Professional. Arrives in groups, lanyard still attached from the office, and experiences BarSparta as, in their own words, "basically like work, but with better ale." This type is responding to a form of environmental familiarity: the discomfort, the judgment, the sense of being perpetually assessed and found adequate but not exceptional, replicates the texture of their professional existence so closely that they find it relaxing rather than challenging. This type is, arguably, the most philosophically interesting, because they are not visiting BarSparta for contrast with their daily experience. They are visiting for continuity. The discomfort is their comfort zone. BarSparta has simply given it table service.
Type B: The Shoreditch Creative. Arrived early, will be disappointed when mainstream, has already described BarSparta in three separate pieces of content as "more than a pub, it's a statement." This type is correct, though whether they are responding to the statement or producing it is unclear. What is clear is that they are doing their push-ups with full aesthetic commitment and documenting them.
Type C: The Fitness Community Visitor. Came for the push-ups. Stayed for the philosophy. Now integrates BarSparta into their training regimen. Does the push-ups on the way in and on the way out "for symmetry." The bouncer has stopped commenting. Some things are beyond the scope of a door policy.
Type D: The Person From Outside London. Travels from Edinburgh four times a year specifically to stand at this bar and be told their complaints are insufficient. Says it "resets" them. Is clearly onto something but is unable to explain what it is in terms that are communicable to the average psychiatrist.
Type E: The Accidental Visitor. Wandered in from a work event without adequate briefing. Completed push-ups out of social compliance. Joined the battle cry beginning with embarrassed compliance and ending with full-throated enthusiasm. Returned the following week. Did not wander. Knew exactly where they were going. Is now a regular. The accidental visitor is the most important customer type because they are the proof of concept: people who did not know they wanted this are discovering that they did.
It is worth pausing, at this point, to note what the actual historical Spartans were. They were, by the standards of any contemporary ethical framework, quite alarming: a militarised slave economy built on the systematic exploitation of the helot population, the selective culling of newborns deemed physically inadequate, and a cultural apparatus designed to produce, above all else, soldiers who could endure. Spartan values — discipline, endurance, collective identity, suspicion of luxury — emerged from a specific historical context that has essentially nothing in common with a Shoreditch bar with a good gin selection.
BarSparta has, wisely, understood this. As Woolf observes in her report, the pub has taken the aesthetic of Spartan culture and detached it entirely from the context that made it historically horrifying. What remains is something unexpected: the form of Spartan discipline, applied with full commitment and zero actual coercion, producing something that is not suffering but the feeling of having voluntarily chosen difficulty, which is entirely different and significantly more pleasant. Nobody at BarSparta is actually suffering. The olive is excellent. The suffering is aspirational. This is, in fact, the Shoreditch way with all things.
The ancient Spartans would, if asked for their opinion of BarSparta, likely object to the gin. Spartans were famously hostile to alcohol that compromised clarity of judgment — the krypteia, their secret police, reportedly used to intoxicate helots to demonstrate the dangers of drink. But BarSparta's two-ingredient cocktail policy, its suspicion of complexity in spirits, its insistence that the ale be earned rather than simply purchased — these things the Spartans might, grudgingly, acknowledge as directionally correct.
The olive, they would approve of. The lecture accompanying it, absolutely. The push-ups at the door, without question.
The battle cry at 10:45, they would deliver with considerably more conviction than the current clientele, but nobody is complaining about the current clientele.
We arrive, eventually, at the question that BarSparta — joking aside, which in the London Prat tradition means the joking continues but becomes more structurally load-bearing — actually raises about contemporary London and its inhabitants.
The city is expensive. It is relentless. It offers its residents a quantity of comfort — convenience, option, service, entertainment — that would have been unimaginable to every previous generation of Londoners, and it charges, for this comfort, a price in money, time, cognitive load, and constant ambient anxiety that has produced a population who are, by various measures, simultaneously very comfortable and quite miserable about it. The amenities are extraordinary. The experience of having them is somehow not.
Into this context arrives a pub that removes all the comfort and puts a queue outside.
The historian's instinct is to reach for precedent: the early Christians who sought out discomfort as spiritual discipline; the Victorian muscular Christians who believed physical hardship produced moral character; the entire tradition of British public school education, which proceeded on the assumption that cold showers and inadequate food produced better men, a thesis that was never really proven but was applied with extraordinary consistency for several centuries. Voluntary discomfort as character development is not new. The pub format is new. The branding is new. The concept that this is, among other things, quite funny is definitely new.
BarSparta is, in the end, a pub that has noticed something true about the city it sits in and has had the audacity — the Spartan audacity, one might say — to build a business on it. Londoners are looking for a context in which the difficulty of their lives is acknowledged as meaningful, named as purposeful, and served with a generous pour. They are looking for a space that says: yes, it's hard. The chips are six. This is correct. You are doing it right. Well. You might be doing it slightly wrong. But the attempt is correct.
The olive, when it comes, is excellent.
You will have earned it.
You are earning it right now, reading this article, which is available for free but has cost you six minutes of your life. The time is the push-up. The knowledge is the ale. The Prat is the bouncer, watching with an expression of profound neutrality as you complete your repetitions and proceed to the bar.
The British pub has survived the Black Death, the gin craze, the temperance movement, two World Wars, the introduction of food, the removal of smoking, the advent of the craft beer revolution, the subsequent backlash against the craft beer revolution, and the long, confusing period in which everyone simultaneously decided that they didn't drink and also that they did drink but only "mindfully." It will survive BarSparta. It will also, and this is the more interesting observation, be improved by it.
Because what BarSparta has demonstrated is not that Londoners want to be punished. What it has demonstrated is that Londoners want their experience to mean something. That a drink earned is different from a drink purchased. That six chips eaten in the right spirit are more satisfying than a full portion consumed on a comfortable sofa while checking one's phone. That the battle cry at 10:45 is not absurd. That the shared absurdity of it is, actually, the point: a city of eleven million people who mostly pretend not to know each other, suddenly shouting together in a basement bar in Shoreditch because something — the ale, the push-ups, the absence of chairs, the lecture about the olive — has briefly made everyone in the room feel like they are part of the same thing.
That is what pubs are for. BarSparta has simply made it legible.
We recommend it. We recommend reading Violet Woolf's full account of Bar Sparta London before you go. We recommend completing your push-ups with visible effort but without visible distress. We recommend ordering the ale. We recommend not asking for more chips.
The olive will be worth it.
The London Prat — Established 1961. Still standing. More than anyone expected. Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
Related: Bar Sparta London: Where the Beer Is Warm, the Chairs Are Missing, and the Suffering Is Genuinely Revolutionary — Violet Woolf