18-Nov-2006 The Daily Telegraph - Last Chance Saloon
It is a strange irony that as middle-class families flee cities in ever greater numbers, in pursuit of the rural dream, the villages they migrate to are imploding. The pub, immortalised by John Major as purveyor of the warm beer that is an essential ingredient of an English summer day, is reckoned to be the heart of a village. Up to the Second World War, when most villagers worked on the land and had gargantuan thirsts for beer, even a small place might have had four or five pubs. Today 60 per cent of villages have no pub and every week six country landlords call time for the last time. More than three quarters of them will never reopen as pubs.
Cynics say the decline, however sad, is inevitable. You can't buck the market. But a group of campaigners who care deeply about the quality of life in rural Britain, led by the Prince of Wales, has sent out an SOS to rescue Britain's village pubs. Why not use the pub, they suggest, not just to sell pints but as the centre for other crucial services?
The Pub is the Hub campaign was launched by Prince Charles through his Business in the Community programme to bring together owners, brewers and licencees to fight to save rural pubs. The vision of thriving villages with their lifeblood restored has struck a chord with the public in an alienating age of supermarkets and online banking. People are queuing to get in on the act, despite the long hours and extra work involved in being this new kind of hybrid landlord. In five years, Pub is the Hub has acted as midwife to some 300 schemes, while inquiries from people who want to save their local are running at more than 60 a month.
The village shop and post office is facing a similar crisis: 72 per cent of villages now have no shop and 74 per cent no post office. Many of the "Hub" rescue schemes are a combined pub-with-shop and post office; several isolated villages have a bakery operating as part of the pub. Other pubs have responded to different needs. One hosted Sunday services while the church was being restored, another houses a playgroup and some offer prescription-collection services and a library. Ten pubs in Lincolnshire are to start using their kitchens to provide hot lunches for local primary school children, who otherwise receive no hot midday meal.
The revamped pubs have been conspicuously successful. In 90 per cent of them, turnover has increased - in most cases by 70 to 80 per cent. This has encouraged some of the bigger pub-owning companies, which in the past have been eager to sell off ailing country pubs for residential use, to get involved. Enterprise Inns and Punch Taverns have supported some new pub-shop "combos" and found they are again looking at a profitable pub.
Some of the smaller pub-owning breweries have also come aboard. In Kent, Shepherd Neame teamed up with the Post Office to offer a mobile post office and grocery store in four of its pubs. It also installed a satellite receiver in a pub garden to bring broadband to a village that has no mobile-phone signal. The school now has free broadband access and, as a result of locals piggybacking off this, a new business has started up.
The flood of goodwill opened up by Pub is the Hub has surprised its organisers, including campaign co-ordinator John Longden, a partner with Gerald Eve surveyors who has a lifetime of experience in the property side of the pub industry. "I have been amazed at how strongly people feel about the rural pub," he says. "They see it as far more than a place where you go to buy a drink. It stands for a traditional way of life, where people know their neighbours and care about them, and where companionship counts for as much as your bank balance. Our campaign has alerted people to the fact that once the pub and local services go, these values are lost too."
In some instances, says Longden, local determination has moved a brewery to acts of unexpected generosity. "The villagers of Shipton Gorge, near Bridport in Dorset, wanted to save their pub, which was closed for a year while Palmers considered its future. Palmers has now decided to lease it to the villagers for a very reasonable rent to see if they can run it themselves."
The biggest problem is finance. Help with extensions, the redesign of an old-fashioned bar or the installation of shop equipment can be the clincher in making a scheme viable. Pub is the Hub has no money of its own, but acts as a conduit to funding agencies. Some councils are so concerned at the collapse of rural services that they are offering grants to anyone who thinks they can make a Hub scheme work. Cumbria County Council, for example, is prepared to offer up to £25,000 per project for the next three years.
There are still considerable obstacles to saving many rural pubs. Soaring house prices and the changing nature of village life mean that a struggling pub run on traditional lines often makes considerably more money for its owner if it is sold for residential use. However, the overwhelming majority of these combined pub-plus-services schemes prove financially successful. This, says Longden, is frequently a mystery to the pub industry. It is not a mystery to him: "If a publican comes along, gets involved in a community's needs, saves the shop and brings an ailing pub back to life, it puts the heart back into a village and people are immeasurably grateful. I tell my friends in the pub-owning world: 'If you support the community, the community will support you.' I think they're starting to get the message.
Old Crown,
Hesket Newmarket
When the patrons of the Old Crown in the tiny cumbrian village of Hesket newmarket heard that their pub was up for sale, they had a whip-round and bought it themselves. "It was a free house with its own distinctive character," says Julian Ross, chairman of the co-operative that owns the pub. "We were worried that some pub chain would come in, put in all their nasty branded decor and turn it into a clone of all their other pubs."
The Old Crown is a traditional pubby pub, with low ceilings, a small wooden bar, and the appealingly shabby feel of a well-worn leather shoe. It symbolises the crisis hitting rural communities. Without its existence, such an isolated spot would have not just no beer but also no heart.
Hesket Newmarket home to 250 people, is 13 miles from Carlisle in the north and Penrith in the east. The Old Crown is the last Dub in a village that until the beginning of the 20th century supported seven. Historically hill-fanning country, the area now lives largely off the tourists attracted by the rugged landscape of the Northern Fells. These days, many of the villagers are second-homers or southerners who have migrated north.
Julian, a freelance translator who moved there from Cambridge, says he had no trouble finding 125 people "willing to stump up £1,500 each to own a bit of a funny little pub". Various local authorities, came up with grants totalling £35,000. The co- operative has already built a new kitchen and dining-room out of its income.
There was another reason why the people didn't want a large brewery taking over. All the beer sold in the pub was brewed out the back in a former shed, and it would have put this brewery, which was also a co-operative, out of business. "The great thing about our set-up," says Julian, "is that because it is locally owned everything spent in the pub stays in the community."
Since the Old Crown reopened three years ago, 15 other rural pubs have been bought up by their village communities, inspired by the Cumbrian example. Prince Charles was so impressed that he paid the pub a visit.
"HRH is very keen on people retaining the individuality of their communities," says Julian. "He liked the way we decided to hang on to something that we prized." The biggest challenge was finding the right landlords. The co-operative found them in the shape of Lou and Linda Hogg, outsiders who heard the job was available while staying in the village. After several probing interviews, they were accepted and Lou decided to throw in his job manufacturing electrical circuit boards, while Linda gave up her nursing-home career.
The community has benefited in all sorts of ways. Lou has introduced a cash-back service, a boon in such an isolated place. A little-used room in the pub recently hosted a 10-week philosophy course that attracted 20 people every week. A conference-organising firm has donated two computers and a broadband facility, so that villagers can learn IT skills in the pub. Iou transferred his bank account to the local post office. "They use my money to pay people's pensions, and then the pensioners come in here on Saturday night and give me it back," he says with a smile.
Ninety-five per cent of the pub's food is sourced locally. Lou buys his puddings from the village shop and cafe. Cumberland sausages come from a butcher four miles away and the meat for the pub's celebrated curries comes from another local supplier. In their three years in the pub, Lou and Linda have hosted a chain of events that have raised £20,000 for local charities.
The pub is making money again. The brewery now delivers to about a dozen other pubs and is planning to produce a range of bottled beers. But some people mutter that the "yuppie oncomers", as they call southerners, have altered things. Arthur Walby, an assistant brewer and one of the few genuine locals to be a shareholder in both pub and brewery, says: "It used to be a scruffy old dump under the original landlord, but I fitted in like a glove. Now it's all spreadsheets and committees and price lists."
He concedes, however, that the "oficomers" really love the pub: "Some bought holiday cottages because they like the Old Crown." What would have happened if the locals had bought it? Arthur smiles wryly: "They'd have sold it as a house to more yuppie offcomers within five years. To be honest, not many locals wanted to know."
The Bell
Tanworth in Arden
There aren't many pubs in England where you can turn up at 10 o'clock in the morning, post a parcel, have a cappuccino with a chocolate-dusted almond and buy a loaf of olive bread, a jar of pesto with sardines or a chunk of taleggio cheese to take home for lunch. But the Bell Hotel in Tanworth in Arden, Warwickshire, is one of them.
Two hundred years ago, the Bell was a staging post for Birmingham-to-Stratford coaches. When Ashley Bent took it on nearly four years ago, it was dowdy and run down, a shabby place "with a sticky carpet and green flocked wallpaper" and a bleak public bar accommodating "one bloke with a pint of cider". Today the imposing bar, which cuts a gleaming right angle of glossy steel through the whole of the opened-up ground floor, is more Conran than country, as are the delicacies in the shop.
But this picturesque village, with an 11th-century church and a green opposite the pub, is part of Birmingham's affluent commuter belt, and the locals, who include lawyers, dentists, architects and entrepreneurs, love the transformed Bell.
While I am there, one of the regulars, a judge, asks if he can store a side of bacon he has just bought in the pub fridge while he enjoys a glass or two of chilled Sauvignon. "Neil's coming in later and he's going to smoke it for me," he says. Ashley, a floppy-haired, high-octane, 48-year-old with a background running modern urban cafe-bars, is not your typical country pub landlord. "I was interested in turning the pub around," he says. "It's a beautiful spot with a potentially fantastic clientele. I wanted to turn it into an up-market gastro operation with hotel rooms."
Ashley, whose wife Jacqueline, has a hairdressing business, runs the pub on his own. During his first year, the man who ran the post office next door announced that he was packing up and suggested that Ashley ran the post office in the pub. It appealed to Ashley, who was aware of a lack of resources in the village. "We are only 20 minutes out of Britain's second city and five minutes from the ultra-busy M40/M42 network," he says, "yet if you want a pint of milk, and haven't got a car, you're stuck."
The pub owners, Enterprise Inns, were sympathetic and the Bell became the first scheme to receive their financial support. Revamping the tired pub and converting the old bar into a stylish delicatessen and post office cost £120,000. Enterprise Inns loaned £80,000 and £40,000 came from grants made available through Pub is the Hub. Ashley put in about £12,000 to install the fixtures and fittings for the look he wanted: artfully-worn wooden floors, grey leather banquettes, donkey-brown velvet pouffes and tea lights.
The recipe - the pub sells almost as much Sauvignon as beer and the food is heavily influenced by the chefs Egyptian wife - evidently works. Takings are up from less than £2,000 a week when Ashley took over to! more than £12,000.
The post office is open five and a half days a week and Is attracting more grateful customers. It takes between £500 and £1,000 a week, depending on the time of year, and trade is increasing by 20 per cent year on year. It has provided a part time job for a retired businessman who comes in to help Ashley.
The shop mainly offers luxuries that include confit de canard, pasta sauces and smart bread from a local bakery, but it also stocks basics such as tea, coffee and milk. And school children can pop into the pub for ice cream and penny sweets.
Locals have gained in other ways. The Sunday school now meets in the pub,while the Bell supports a variety of local functions. A fundraising ball for the school got its marquee for nothing, and the school-leavers' ball was given its own marquee and chocolate fountain. Villagers can even get fresh fish now, if they order through the pub kitchen.
"The local garage owner drops in to tax a car when he gets a sale and I take my car to him to be serviced," says Ashley. "The church provides us with lots of custom, with all the weddings, christenings and funerals. In return we offer locals uho are having a party special rates for the hotel rooms. Village life is a two-way thing."
John Bate. 64. a retired organist from the church and a Bell regular, adds: "They used to say that if you sat outside the Cafe de la Paix in Paris for a couple of hours you'd see all your friends. Well, the Bell is like that If you sit outside in the summer, you see all your friends. It's enormously convenient to be able to buy bread and milk and a bottle of decent wine, but it's much more than just a shop or just a pub. It's a real meeting place for the village. I live on my own and come in most days and there's always someone to talk to."
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