Elegy for the Burn Bullock

Grim news yesterday evening (19th April 2024) of a serious fire at the Burn Bullock pub in Mitcham, south London.  Eighty firefighters and twelve appliances were in attendance.  Nobody was hurt, but the damage to the listed building is considerable, possibly beyond repair.  Although the oldest, Tudor, part is apparently relatively intact, the devastation to rest of the building is obvious from the news pictures.  Behind the handsome eighteenth-century façade overlooking the London Road — from whose false windows I first learned about the ‘window tax’ — the fire has ravaged all three floors, as well as most of the 17th-century wing.  The roof is gone. 

This former coaching inn was known as the King’s Head until 1975, when it was renamed in honour of the cricketer Burnett ‘Burn’ Bullock (d. 1954), who was also a previous landlord.  Cricket is essential to the story of the pub and to this part of Mitcham.  Right next door is the pavilion of the Cricket Club, while across the road the Cricket Green has a serious claim to be the oldest in existence: the game has been played here since 1685.  The Association of Cricket Umpires and Scorers was formed in the pub, in an upstairs room now known to have been destroyed.  The building is a Mitcham landmark, and for three centuries has been an unmistakeable part of the Cricket Green.

What is so painful is that this disaster has been entirely foreseeable.  Since the pub closed in 2013, it has spent more than a decade sinking into dilapidation while its future has been debated.  Various planning applications by an evidently elusive landowner have been found unsuitable by Merton Council (as well as by the neighbouring Cricket Club).  Meanwhile the situation has been exploited by squatters, who have been occupying the building illegally since 2014, and ignored a series of council enforcement notices.  Now the pub’s place on the ‘Heritage at Risk’ register of Historic England has been vindicated in the most horrible way.

A foreseeable disaster, and foreseen.  The Burn Bullock has been ‘disgracefully neglected for years’, Mitcham Cricket Club has said.  ‘Our worst fear’, was the opening to a Twitter thread reporting the fire by a member of the Cricket Green Community & Heritage Association.  They and other organisations have been sounding the alarm repeatedly for some time.  It is a nightmare we have long been dreading; I have been particularly worried about it since the affair of the Crooked House in the West Midlands in which criminal owners tore down the remains of a listed pub building suspiciously promptly after it (equally suspiciously) went up in flames.  So it is very hard not to feel angry as well as bereft.  The thought also crosses the mind that the fire might not have been an accident, not least because it was so spectacular, even after a day of rain.  I suppose we shall soon find out.

It is also depressing because — without pointing the finger of blame at any party in particular — the whole slide to this point has felt so inevitable.  It seems symptomatic of broader trends that seem to be all around us at the moment, not just in Mitcham but in Britain in general: a leaden sense of ineffectiveness, impotence, even hopelessness in public life.  Why were the civil authorities unable to enforce the law; why did an ‘enforcement notice’ turn out to be nothing of the sort?  Why did the landowner, who himself seems to be merely a representative of a larger and even more labyrinthine investment company, allow the building to decay, fail to secure it against intruders, and otherwise neglect his responsibilities — which were as much to his neighbours as to his shareholders?  Why were the mechanisms which exist precisely to prevent such catastrophes ineffective in this case?  The price of this neglect is now paid by the ordinary people of Mitcham who find themselves unable to hand down to the next generation another piece of their heritage, another familiar landmark.  This pub stood for three hundred years, survived road-widening (as neighbouring buildings did not), suburbanisation and the Luftwaffe (which in 1941 scored a direct hit on the nearby Cricketers pub), but we in our own time have been powerless to keep it safe.  Ten years were enough to bring about its downfall — and three hours sufficient for its finale.  

Why does Mitcham always seem to lose out?  In spite of the hard work and determination of many locals doing their best to maintain civic pride (the Pawełek ice-cream parlour and restaurants, the Wednesday Coffee Club at the Royal British Legion, the very welcome Canons refurbishment project, a number of dedicated local conservation groups), they seem to be fighting a losing battle against the encroachment of powerful, impersonal, faceless forces.   Developers who know nothing of the place and seem to have little regard for Mitcham’s vestigal ‘village feel’ (or at least the sense of a ‘village suburb’), are always circling with various outlandish plans for flats as pricey as they are boxy.  The town centre around the Fair Green to the north has slumped badly in the past ten years, and the indifference of the volumes of traffic coursing their way through along all points of the compass seems symbolic of these eroding, homogenising trends.  The damage to the Burn Bullock is a further and irreplaceable blow to that intangible thing, the character of a place: the particular flavour, accumulated with many layers of years and generations of pride and care, that makes it feel like home.

A picture of the pub as it was some time in the late 1980s can be seen here.

Mitcham Cricket Green, where cricket has been played since 1685, with the Burn Bullock pub in the background to the right.  Watercolour by Terry Harrison (1951–2017), reproduced with his widow’s kind permission.