10-Jan-2010
Sunday Times - Save the pub or let it die? It’s your shout
My favourite story of this cold winter is the one about the 60 guests who got snowed in over the new year at the Tan Hill Inn, Britain’s highest pub, 1,732ft above sea level in the Yorkshire Dales.
What tickled me was not that everyone mucked in peeling potatoes, cleaning lavatories and holding up the bar while Tracy Daly, the landlady, rescued motorists from drifts, nor that the guests appeared so reluctant to be rescued when the roads were opened three days later, but that this was clearly a story that captured the public imagination because of our love affair with the pub.
With 50 pubs closing every week you would think that love affair was well and truly over. We are living through a time of unprecedented disaster for the public house, something that foreigners think is culturally and architecturally unique to Britain. The question is whether we care — I think we do — and whether there is anything we can do to save those centres of community life before they slide into oblivion.
The great paradox of our time is that the decline of the British pub has been going on over the same period as the rise in alcohol abuse detailed in the report on alcohol by the Commons health select committee, published last week. According to the committee, the nation consumed approximately 3½ litres of pure alcohol per head per year in 1947. The current figure is 9½ litres.
It gets you thinking that the pub, and the drinking of weak beer that traditionally went with it, might be part of the solution.
You have only to look at the demise of the pubs in our rather touristy village in Constable country (pop 1,800) to see how rapid the decline in viability of pubs has been. There were five pubs in the village when Tony Blair came to power in 1997. There are now two: one is a former coaching inn, now a highly successful gastro-pub (pubs that serve good food and wine buck the trend); the other, which is also housed in a medieval building, sells standard tourist fare.
All the pubs we have lost are mourned by the village, even though it is at least partly our own fault they are gone. One, a medieval house with flagstones on the floor, is now a private house. My teenage son is just old enough to remember standing in it, aged five, and having the stool pointed out where his grandfather used to drink. One pub, dating back to the 1600s, which gives its name to a whole road, was demolished after a murky planning row, to be replaced by three executive homes. The most recent, a working-class pub beside a former council estate, was still going a year ago, cooking good food and acting as the heart of the community, until the owner put up the rent and the licensee closed the doors for the last time.
Our vicar tells me there were six pubs in the village in 1917. Why is it that we lost only one pub between 1917 and 1997 but have lost three since then? That, we must assume, is caused by recent trends, chief of them drinking at home. We choose to take home our cheap supermarket booze and drink it watching a DVD. Then there are the drink-driving laws and more recently the laws on smoking (which inadvertently put a pub’s least attractive clientele out on the street in front of you in most weathers, a good reason to drive by).
The price of beer comes into it, too. Tax on beer has gone up 18% since the budget of 2008. Perhaps worst of all for the publicans is that big brewers don’t own pubs any more. That’s why they don’t have much empathy with pubs. When the Tories made the big brewers divest themselves of their pubs in 1989, they were bought by outside investors who gave the landlords so little slack that they could not open their doors in the morning with a smile on their face or take an interest in their communities.
The more you acquaint yourself with the detail, though, the less the pub’s decline seems inevitable. Pub Is the Hub, a Harrogate-based charity, has shown that the pub does not need to die if enlightened businesses and communities don’t want it to. It argues that if rural pubs support the community by taking over the post office, by cooking school lunches or becoming involved with local sports clubs, the public comes back and supports the pub. Some locals have even clubbed together to buy the pub and given the freehold to the parish council so the leaseholder is not relentlessly obliged to make a 10% return on capital, which wrecks pub and community.
Our family went on an impromptu pub crawl with friends just after the new year, partly to introduce our teenagers to each other, partly to sample the local pubs while they were still there. What began as nostalgic recreation of our student days and a bit of bravado made a strong impression on the teenagers. They met local people of different ages whom they would not otherwise have met. They were fascinated by the different atmospheres and architecture, even of the naff ones. We all drank responsibly.
The adults vowed to go out for a pint more often.
As a nation, we have the choice. A crackdown on supermarkets advertising cheap alcohol, coupled with lower tax for weaker beer — favoured by both the health select committee and Camra, the real ale campaign — could even now turn back the clock and draw people to more civilised drinking, down the pub.
In the News
24-Feb-2010
Cambridge News - Villagers will pop to pub for a book of stamps
A Post Office is to open in a village pub.
Staff at the Queen’s Head in Long Lane, Fowlmere, will soon be serving books of stamps and weighing parcels as well as pulling pints
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13-Feb-2010
This is Scunthorpe - Workshops aim to help rural businesses
RURAL pubs and shops in North Lincolnshire are being urged to look at unconventional ways of generating more business and helping their communities.
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30-Jan-2010
Yorkshire Post Country Week - The village that discovered value of co-operation
In our series about how Yorkshire's village shops have been fighting back, Fiona Russell reports on the success on her doorstep.
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