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My old pub has banned mobiles. I cherish the return of tranquility

<span>Photograph: Imperial War Museums/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Imperial War Museums/Getty Images

It was during the pouring of my first pint that I began to realise that at the Commercial Hotel in Knaresborough they do things a little differently. Standing at the bar, I was briefly texting my whereabouts to a friend. “You’ll have to put that phone away,” the barman told me. “This is a digital detox pub.”

I had seen the signs. It was hard to miss them since they were on every wall. Every beer mat carried the same message, an image of a digital device and a “no-entry” sign. I had not, however, bargained on such draconian enforcement of the rules. Having gone outside to complete the text, I came back and produced my bank card to pay for the lager. The barman pointed to another sign. “We don’t take cards, only cash. If you go up the high street, you can find a cashpoint.” As I left for a second time to get some money, I thought I caught the trace of a smirk on a fellow drinker’s face as they gazed impassively into the middle distance.

I grew up in Knaresborough when the Commercial was known as the Borough Bailiff, and drank there with much of the rest of the local school’s sixth form. Since those days I hadn’t been back much. But over the Christmas holidays I was intrigued by the sight of a roaring fire and ventured in. As one TripAdvisor commenter puts it: “Welcome to the 1970s.” At the behest of this Samuel Smith pub’s 75-year-old owner, Humphrey Smith, modernity has been barred. The list of prohibitions is impressively long: no phones, no laptops, no Kindles, no music, no TV, no bank cards, as well as no swearing and no dogs.

It would be fair to say this is not to everyone’s taste. Earlier this month, a punter at a Samuel Smith’s pub in London appeared in the Daily Mail after complaining of the heavy-handed treatment she and her friends received when checking their phones during a Christmas get-together. Sally Lait had pointed out on Twitter that in certain circumstances, the use of a phone might be an urgent necessity. A host of respondents shared her outrage at the “if you don’t like it, leave” policy. My head agrees with Lait. But, disturbingly, my heart has been captured by the Knaresborough pub that my brother and I now refer to as “the Authoritarian”. I found myself coming back again and again.

Like the 200 or so other Samuel Smith pubs, the Authoritarian preserves old demarcations in its layout. A snug with its own fire lies to the left of the main entrance. On the far right a saloon type-bar features a pool table and darts. Wood panelling and comfortable upholstery dominate the interior. The aesthetic is, as the company’s website stipulates, “uncompromisingly Victorian”. But it also lovingly channels the spirit and ethos of the Moon Under Water, the fictional pub described by George Orwell in a famous 1946 article for the Evening Standard, where “there is generally a good fire burning in at least two of the bars and the Victorian layout of the place gives one plenty of elbow room … it is always quiet enough to talk. The house possesses neither a radio nor a piano and even on Christmas Eve … the singing is of a decorous kind.”

Smith is a billionaire and can afford to tailor his pubs to his own nostalgic tastes, regardless of what the market will bear. The remarkably cheap beer in the Authoritarian all comes from the company’s Tadcaster brewery, 20 miles away. That cuts overheads. But according to the bar staff, since the pub re-opened in August with its austere new rules, revenues are up. And with few exceptions, the strict instructions are accepted and even relished.

I quickly understood why. To spend an afternoon or an evening there is a strange, almost other-worldly, experience. I had forgotten what it was like to be in a place where all talk and conversation was face-to-face and the outside world could not be reached. Nowhere else – certainly not the home – is a bounded sanctuary like this anymore; the intrusive reach of digital communication penetrates all other spaces. In the Authoritarian, things are seen and heard that the brain begins to remember and recognise, which it had all but forgotten: the sight of a couple sitting quietly at a table by the fire, sipping a drink while gazing out at high-street shoppers; the sound of loose change in a pocket as someone roots around for the price of a pint; the hushed conversation of two people propping up the bar, which barely disturbs the silence of mid-afternoon; the crack of a newspaper page being stretched and turned.

My father used to go to a pub like this 50 years ago. Just off the market square, it was called the Little Elephant. He would disappear into the windowless snug for a half-pint, carrying his paper, midway through doing the Saturday shopping. Perhaps, subliminally, it’s the memory of him that made me feel so instantly affectionate towards a place that has torn up the rulebook of modern drinking. Or perhaps it’s the way it forces me to sit and be in one place and one place only, unable to restlessly chase what might be happening elsewhere.

It feels like a guilty pleasure, because it is hard to warm to what one hears of Smith, who makes unannounced spot-checks at his pubs to root out mobile phone users and sweary drinkers. And critics like Wait are justified in pointing out the flaws. But amid the welcome news that the number of bars in Britain has risen for the first time in a decade, I have concluded, and I hope Orwell might agree, that every town needs a pub like the Commercial Hotel.