Six Ways kill a Village Pub: Or the Murder of The Old Albion

I was brought up in a pub, I have served in a pub and have changed the occasional old wooden barrel. The first time I struck that brass tap with a wooden mallet I hoped that disaster would not also strike. The thought of a barrel of best bitter flooding the cellar did not bare thinking about. Although my pub life came to end shortly before my 19th birthday I had enough experience of customers to learn quite a bit about ordinary people, both the wicked, sad, reliable and occasionally heroic.

Our pub was a town centre house, killed off by the sudden obsession with television and property prices. But it had at its centre a loyal and interesting mix of customers and a house tradition of being run simply, but well. Keg beers? What were they? My father had taken over the pub from my maternal grandfather who had been running pubs since he retired from the army before the First War. My mother and her four sisters had been helping their father run the pun. In my mother’s case since she was 14. He had risen from a raw recruit to be the RSM for the Royal West Kent Regiment. He had quite a reputation as a local character having fort in the Boar War as a first generation Dutch immigrant to Essex, been mentioned in dispatches and had led the force that ended a riot at the local prison. His customers knew he would brook no nonsense. Despite his reputation in the town, all these pub girls took a while to find husbands suitable from the RSM’s viewpoint. Unfortunately some suitors would have been discouraged from marrying a publican’s daughter. One of my aunts had to wait some 15 years before her boy friend’s father died, such was his opposition to the marriage. I had no idea of this prejudice growing up in the 1950’s and have only recently come learn of the stigma attached to my family's trade.

With my background I have always thought, until recently, that I was perfectly qualified to baldy state that if you take me to a ‘bad’ or ‘dying pub’, I will be able to introduce you to a bad landlord. I say until recently because rather a lot of things have changed so that various exceptions have to be noted, but outside of these exceptions I still think I know why many village pubs across the country are now dying or being killed, sometimes with malice aforethought. A common cause for closure in some urban areas is that there are too many pubs for the potential customers. Re-housing has left many pubs with a smaller market nut this not so common in a rural community, unless the second home level is so high, the winter brings too many dark properties. I must add that in my own county there are many excellent village pubs who serve as examples of how it should be done, even though trading conditions are continually being made worse by the decisions of Government and the recession. Suffice it to say, if I make a return visit to a pub it is usually because I like it, unless of course it is so bad I have to see it again to believe it.

The accessory before the fact for ‘pubicide’ is Government. High alcohol duties and the smoking ban have made a tough situation worse. Smokers have to be outside which means that non-smokers have to go inside to avoid smoke and they in turn often lose the pleasures of drinking outside. When I was a kid a pub with a Children’s Room was a great change to sitting outside by myself with a lemonade and a packet of crisps. Now, once they have tired of any ‘Jungle Room’ facility children join their parents in the restaurant area and run amuck. I haven’t seen a children room for years. Why couldn’t a Smokers Room have been developed so that drinks were bought into a well ventilated separate bar area by the smokers themselves? ‘Smoking damages your health’, I hear you say. So does drinking, so why not close the pub in that case?
Publicans have had to put up with the high alcohol duty as unlike the supermarkets they have little room to sell lost leaders. Combine this with the higher costs of the multinational drinks industry, often advertising third rate beverages, and a whole raft of overheads for the publican, is it little wonder that margins are narrow? However, these are the main causes of death which will often be found at the pub’s post mortem:

1) Not understanding the word ‘hospitality’: I am now going to be accused of being as snob, mainly the people taking on a pub have no idea of what the term ‘hospitality’ means. Is there a question that brewers put to tenants along the lines, ‘Do you like people?’ If so it would seem that the qualifying answer is, ‘No’. Did Basil Faulty open a charm school for prospective landlords I wonder? There don’t seem to be ‘the right sort’ new landlords about nowadays. Some of them seem to have no idea what they are up to.

2) Serving rubbish or pretentious food: both inappropriately priced. Serving fry ups and grill ups straight from the freezer might well be a speciality of the Basil Faulty School of Catering if there were one. Luckily the standard of pub catering is usually very good, although I draw the line at pretentious menus with yuppy age central London prices. Somewhere between these two, most catering landlords, and of course landladies have struck a happy balance between cost and quality, often making sure that much of the menu is locally sourced. There is nothing wrong with good honest pub grub. Get rid of that and another nail goes in the pub’s coffin.

3) Not selling local real ales and cider: why do some publicans think they are running a milk bar or soda bar with only nitrogen infused fizzy pop bears or just bottled beer? I do that at home with a bottle opener or a can with a widget device built in. What I don’t want to do is install a hand pump in my living room and a micro brewery in my non-existent cellar. Furthermore if I want to drink Norfolk, Suffolk or Somerset Ciders in Herefordshire I’ll take the trouble of trying the bottled versions from the supermarket or make a trip to try the real stuff on its home territory. So called ‘locals pubs’ that serve a range of fizzy drinks from away are missing the point, and as for local produce, forget.

4) Not opening regularly: opening just at the weekend or from Thursday to Sunday seems to be lazy and not caring about the community. These limited opening times are the first sign of a loss of will on the part of the landlord. If opening the premises becomes a matter of the landlord’s convenience, but they still survive, they have again missed the point. They are supposed to be running a village pub not a minimalist investment company or a retirement cottage.

5) Making sure that the local community is not welcome: failing to have quizzes, providing a meeting place for local groups or a folk session once a month and not encouraging local customers through special promotions. Little things like not displaying posters for local events is a guaranteed sign of not being part of the community. Some pubs seem to think that the high value customers in the tourist season will do. This might well serve the proprietors long term plans for the building but the concept of the village pub has already being put to death by such proprietors. Which brings me to my final method of killing a village pub.

6) Not wanting to run the property as a pub at all: planning to apply for a change of use either to a private residence or for building development is the most common ulterior motive for the deliberate running down of a business. There are extreme cases of landlords turning away customers or regular folk singers so as to prepare poor accounts in readiness for the planning application. In one case, having lost a planning appeal for a housing development, the landlord actually demolished the building and the last time I saw the site it had been fenced off for nearly two years. If in the future there is any opportunity left to object to such a change of use, the claim that the business was not viable should be met with evidence to show that it was the landlord who was not viable, being a person unsuited to run a village pub because they wanted to convert it. A private house is worth so much more. In such cases I would say, ‘Show me a bad pub and will show you a deliberately bad landlord’.

‘Herein lies the plot of the Old Albion’ RIP

Village Pubs: Decline and Fall?

I grew up in a pub and spent much of my teenage years both sides of the counter. I like to think I know what a good community pub should be. More correctly, I like to think I know what a good landlord is. If you get that right you get a good pub. Our own local pubs keep going and I hasten to add that the following comments are not prompted by these valued community assets, but by my experiences generally.

Firstly, the landlord should be hospitable. So many landlords seem to think it is their mission in life to defy you to have a pleasant time. The customer needs a place to sit and have a quiet drink, not a table set out for dinner. On entering you should not be confronted by a wall of people drinking at the bar who are not being served but have claimed the counter as their own territory. It doesn’t have to be a silent temple but a choice is nice. Real beers and ciders at the right temperature should be on offer. A monopoly of gaseous drinks tells me that the management have no skills and might as well be running milk bar. You should not be poked in the eye by a thoughtless pool player who has forgotten that a cue has two ends. If there are others waiting I do not expect to be asked, ‘Whose next?’ in a sulking tone of voice, which is really saying, ‘Why are you here?’

It doesn’t have to be ‘refurbished’, because atmosphere probably ended up on the builders skip with a load of other treasures, like hand pumps. I don’t think it has to be entirely non-smoking either. A smoker’s bar, properly ventilated with access to a non smoking purchasing counter elsewhere, should have been allowed where space permitted. Food could be served and consumed elsewhere in such circumstances. Choice again. Before the ban I had stopped visiting pubs unless I could sit outside. Now, if I want to sit outside I have to get up wind of the smokers if I can. Otherwise I leave. OK, you might claim that non-smoking pubs will improve customers’ health. In that case stop people drinking as well if you really think that smoking and drinking will not take place elsewhere while the pubs die due to bureaucratic strangulation. Occasional live music is also a good idea if choice can be maintained.

Ideally, a pub should be somewhere where you can strike up a conversatio, not places where vows of silence apply. Old style country pubs with their big settles either side of an ingle nook used to encourage conversation, an art which modern society discourages in the interests of privacy. Granted, talking in railway carriages has never been a strong point for the British, but many pubs seem to be adopting this custom. Before pubs were ‘refurbished’ quiet assignations were catered for by the different types of bars. Saloon, Public, Private and Snug Bars, even a Jug and Bottle cubicle, could all exist side by side. Now vast acres of beer soaked carpeted hall seems to be the ideal for many brewers and landlords alike.

Here again, ‘landlord’ now seems an archaic word, with ‘manager’ seeming to be the brewers preference. What with higher alcohol taxes, the smoking ban and a lack of good landlords, it is surprising that the increasing rate of pub closures is not worse. Brewers seem intent on narrowing profit margins for their tenants and stoill expecting the pubs to thrive. Rather like supermarkets and farmers I suppose.
If pubs are to succeed in small communities they must first get the message I read outside a good pub on our recent travels, ‘the pub is the hub’. Ironically the notice board on the church next door displayed no name, denomination or services or vicar’s name. It did however have a formal notice stating that someone was applying to be buried there. If the closure rate continues the village pub will go the same way, and bad landlords will have played their part.