The Compton Arms in Canonbury

• I AM writing to object in the strongest terms to the complaints from some neighbours of The Compton Arms.

The pub has a key place in Islington’s history. George Orwell based his essay “The Moon Under Water” on his love of this pub and two other local hostelries.

The Compton is a much-loved Victorian public house and, even more importantly, a community meeting place in this time of increasing loneliness, as covered in depth by the August 5 Islington Tribune.

Every closed pub is a nail in the coffin of community here in the borough. Islington Council strides to tackle loneliness and support local businesses. It would not be doing the first or the second were it to indulge this tiny number of selfish prima donnas happy to throw away Orwellian and Islington history.

Councillors, please throw out this application! Lots of our young people paying high rents, and older single people, sit in the pub, to mix with others and stave off the worst pangs of loneliness.

The pub is an invaluable meeting place. My former local started courting a particular demographic and bringing in pizzas. Those of us who didn’t belong to it lost our meeting place. Some 40 to 50 of us, who would see each other each week across the pub, now no longer see each other, because we are no longer welcome there.

If the Compton goes, there will be a pub full of locals without a meeting place. One of the country’s greatest writers valued this pub enough to pen an essay on it.

Islington Council should please resist the nimbys who knowingly moved next to this fantastic pub and then decided to get sniffy about it. Our borough has been gentrified and sanitised enough.

Old boozers have become gastropubs or flats. Enough. We have to stop this encroachment on ordinary culture… a good, back-street pub.

This pub has been there for many, many, years. House-buyers who moved in did so knowing they had moved next to a pub. It is outrageous that they now wish to close down a historic, cultural piece of Islington history.

Furthermore there are now young chefs cooking food in the venue. Islington Council is a strong champion of enabling young people begin careers and thrive in the borough.

It must protect these young people from being turfed out of a venue that has welcomed them; and not favour neighbours who are wielding their sharp elbows, having been around, no doubt, for only a drop of time compared with this fine old pub.

Gentrification should not trump community and history. Save the Compton.

DENISE BYRNE, N5