EAST END KNEES UP AT THE ELEANOR ARMS!
Blog by EETG Co-Director Krissie Nicolson. Photographs by Antwoine Ashley-Darpoh. Insta: @antwojne
Reef House Lager is our newest brewing member, making a crisp, gluten-free, thirst-quenching lager. Started on the Isle of Dogs by three childhood friends, Hak, Leon, and Tayla. They grew up in a community where looking out for one another was the only way to get by, and with these shared values of interdependence, Reef House is the perfect collaborator for the Guild. Together, we held our first East End Knees Up at the Eleanor Arms last Thursday.
It was a specific kind of magic, a high-voltage exchange where the barrier between the artist and the audience dissolved. You can’t get that same sense of communion in a big space, and it’s part of the reason independent pubs are so vital.
When Ruby Jean Smith, Royal 2000, and Hak Baker each took the mic, they weren’t just performing for a crowd—they were having a conversation with their neighbours and friends. DJ sets by Shizz McNaughty and No Blacks, No Irish provided the sonic heartbeat that you could feel as our collective joy bounced off the walls and through our tightly packed bodies as we danced. It was a shared medicine for the soul in a world of division caused by big business and big profit.
Before Victorian palaces and sterile commercial ‘units’ existed, the pub was literally a shared living room. In the Middle Ages, the ‘Brewster’ was a woman who would let her community know her home was open to hydrate the neighbourhood by hanging an ale-stake outside her door!
Small independent pubs like the Eleanor Arms and brewers like Reef House are the legacy of these community matriarchs, holding communities in relationship with each other in a way that chain pubs and equity-funded breweries can’t manufacture. At the Eleanor Arms, everyone is welcome, and because of this inclusivity and intimacy, we experience a spontaneous togetherness, which is rooted in love. Love of each other, of East London, of music and dancing, and love of a good pint.
If you want to be the first to know about the next Knees Up and help us fight for streets that retain these vital spaces, here is how you can join the movement:
- Join the Guild here as a Small Business or a self-employed person: Help us champion why staying small and independent isn’t a lack of ambition—it’s a superior ethical framework. The word “Guild” (from the Anglo-Saxon gild) means “payment.” It’s about all of us paying into a collective pot of time and money, so we have the fuel to make our Manifesto for the New Economy a reality to create community wealth and permanently affordable rents.
- Join the Trades Guild Community Land Trust here: You don’t need to be a small business owner to have a say. Join as a neighbour to help us take back “the commons” and ensure land is owned by the people, where wealth is shared, not extracted for private gain
- Do both! When we organise together, we ensure the “ale-stake” stays out and the living room stays open.
