The Tate Modern's local

This review was first published in May 2000

As fresh supplies of meat, veg, ketchup, salad cream, lavatory paper and plastic glasses arrived yesterday at Southwark's Founders Arms pub, manager Pete Foreman wore the look of someone who has struck gold. Which he has. It doesn't need the business nous of Sir John Harvey Jones to tell you that this Youngs' pub, housed in an unprepossessing single-storey building near Black-friars Bridge, is suddenly in a perfect position to print money for its owners. In fact, it finds itself in perhaps the most perfect position of any pub in London: on the forecourt of Tate Modern.

Good things come to those who wait, the Dean of St Paul's might have said when he officially opened the pub in 1980. Then, there was the river and that was about it. The pub used to attract a fair crowd in the summer and it had its regulars from the block of council flats directly behind the building, but nothing in 20 years can compare to what has happened to it in the last month.

It's as if the Founders Arms has become an extension of Tate Modern - an installation piece involving tourists from around the world interspersed with the cool Britannia crowd, the arts establishment and ordinary passers-by. It's a study in eating and drinking. It hardly matters what the place looks like. When the carpets get so full of cigarette burns that no one can remember what colour they were, the brewery need do nothing. If the food is off or the beer too warm, they can pass it off as your problem not theirs. It's how you react to the colour of the pint as it's poured that's important.

"The crucial thing for us has always been the sunshine," said Foreman, 42, who runs the pub with his wife, Lyn, and a rotating staff of 40 - shortly to be increased to 60. "Even before all this happened, we were never short of customers when the sun was shining." The difference now is that the sun is shining whatever the weather. Since Tate Modern opened, Foreman and his crew have been regularly pulling 1,000 pints a day and the queue at the food bar has been just as long as the line to see Sam Taylor-Wood's video of a naked man dancing to techno music, on the fourth floor of the gallery.

"When we walked out on one of the balconies we saw this funny looking pub with people sitting outside and we thought it would be a great place to go after spending a few hours looking at modern art," said David Katchulis, an American on holiday with his wife. "We sat down for half an hour and expected someone to take our order, but then we realised that you have to order it yourself. I guess you can say we are having the British pub experience." They're coming back down to earth from Antony Gormley's erect penis to Pete Foreman's Barnsley Chop with new potatoes, mint butter and beef tomato.

Drink from the well of Damien Hirst's imagination and then knock back a couple of Heinekens and assault a packet of Worcester sauce-flavoured crisps. Raise a glass and let the contents befriend you in ways that you had never thought possible.

With an eye on the future, Youngs refurbished the Founders Arms a couple of years ago. There are even some abstract prints on the walls and a few Ikea-type chairs have been drafted in to give the place a whiff of style. The kitchen is now open-plan - Conranesque - so you can watch your hot gammon and pineapple baguette being created by Australian backpackers who have stayed in London to work. That the Founders Arms has a great future is beyond doubt, but what kind of future is a different matter.

"We are thinking very carefully about which way to go," said Steve Gallagher, Youngs' catering development manager. "It's important that we continue to appeal to everyone and don't start pretending that we're something we're not. The main emphasis now is to bring in new equipment to speed everything up." Until recently, the pub used to serve its beer in real glasses, now they're plastic because glass can't be washed and dried quickly enough. Wine and mineral water sales have soared and there's been a run on champagne in the past few weeks.

There's a Gaggia espresso machine behind the bar, a new fresh-orange squeezer and two new hand-dryers have just arrived.

Charlotte Rampling and Jean Michel Jarre were in the other night, along with Heartbeat's Nick Berry and Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson. It surely won't be long before Peter Mandelson is snapped, pint in hand, talking about how art is for ordinary men. And when it's time for Louise Bourgeois's spider sculpture to move on, the perfect place for it would be the terrace of the Founders Arms. It would keep a lot of people dry in winter.

Founders Arms
52 Hopton Street, SE1 9JH