I have been here before, just never really looked at it. Running from one meeting to another, I never took the time to walk down the little streets between King’s College and St Catherine’s, capture a photograph of the many statutes of Henry VIII, or attack the little shops with hand-made jewelry. Truth to be told, I didn’t quite have the time to do all this today, however we had a nice working lunch at The Eagle.For the past 500 years, millions of students have drunk the wisdom of The Eagle’s walls. Some of these students went on to change the world. Others went back to living with their parents and farming the fruitful land of the Midlands - thus, changing their own world. It is easy to imagine the many conversations held at The Eagle - about changing political systems, powerful speakers, religion and astronomy. You can almost see them - the poet sitting at the corner table, scribbling with his inked feather under the candle-light; the free-spirited young post-Victorian women discussing their voting rights; Francis Crick and James Watson raising the arguments in support of their discovery of the «secret of life» - the DNA.
I heard somewhere that The Eagle today is a major tourist attraction - I could not confirm that. Perhaps, because it was Monday lunch, but the people around us were all loud ambitious students, arguing over engineering courseworks and the decline of Goldman Sachs investment banking. Here they are, the crazy youth, who isn’t afraid to speak up their mind with all that many foreign accents. They may be a handful, but still exist.
There is no wifi, no Foursquare specials, no marketing campaigns. Just a few old-school books on the shelves. Time has stopped at the Eagle - 500 years on, it still serves the same homemade steak-and-ale pie, same pints of that refreshing locally-brewed ale to all the same life-changing individuals. Zero business flexibility.
See, refusing to adapt to the ever-changing information society customer doesn’t make you a marketing failure. It makes you a legend.
Rumor has it, Crick and Watson wrote the DNA structure on a napkin at The Eagle. I wonder how much genetics would have progressed, had they brought their MacBooks.
