AN EAST End boozer has become the first in London where you can barter for a pint or even a pub meal. Landlady Dawn Kolpin and hubby Gary Hedgecock are offering to swap anything on their menu for CDs from Perry Como to The Pogues

By Mike Brooke

AN EAST End boozer has become the first in London where you can barter for a pint or even a pub meal.

Landlady Dawn Kolpin and hubby Gary Hedgecock are offering to swap anything on their menu from quail’s eggs to griddled asparagus for CDs by anyone from Perry Como to The Pogues.

Things Dawn is happy to barter for beer include wire cutters and a flathead screwdriver set to a session servicing the pub’s piano, known affectionately in cockney rhyme as Joanna the Piana’.

It has put Bethnal Green’s Marksman pub firmly on the global network through their barter’ ads on Craigslist website.

JUKEBOX

Dawn posted the ad on the website saying: “I need some CDs for an old school jukebox in my pub. In exchange for a small stack of your CDs, you can have a pub meal.”

The pint-size 36-year-old American-born East End convert’ has so far been offered CDs of everyone from Goldfrapp and The Strokes to Sinatra and the Rolling Stones.

She offers in exchange two drinks and two main courses from the menu at the pub half-way down the Hackney Road.

“Barter is a way customers get through the recession,” she said.

SPIRIT

“But it also adds something to our world by freeing up creativity a bit and attracting people to be more open to new things.”

Dawn is also launching a monthly barter for beer’ evening at The Marksman starting on April 22, which she is promoting on the Craigslist website.

Barter, of course, is the oldest form of trade. It predates the invention of money itself.

The most famous bartering comes from Shakespeare’s Richard III when the tyrant king, having lost a battle and his horse and is about to lose his life, offers a deal:

“A horse—a horse. My kingdom for a horse!”