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

Getting to Grips with Rural Housing

A full discussion paper is available on request by leaving a comment

Firstly, let me make it clear that I appreciate that this can be a sensitive and highly charged topic. Having been observing the trends and listening to people’s views on the subject for more than forty years I have no illusions as to how strongly some people can feel. Secondly, I think we must all appreciate that market forces sweep us all along whether it be in past or present generations. More often than not people finish up being swept up on their residential beach by virtue of economic forces expanding or reducing their choices. Fairness to the individuals or the communities concerned does not come into it. The modern mantra seems to be that you cannot fight market forces. It would seem that in recent times, whatever the rhetoric, we cannot even moderate or mitigate their effect either.

The consequence for rural housing is that young people who have grown up in the countryside cannot afford to stay, a fact recognised this week by the Federation of Master Builders in their press release of 1.9.09:

‘The Federation of Master Builders has demanded action to increase the supply of affordable rural housing following today’s announcement by the National Housing Federation, the National Association of Small Schools, and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, that Primary schools are closing at a rate of one a month in rural England’.

Granted you can accuse them of having a vested interest in taking up this cause, but all of us who live in the countryside, for whatever reason, have a vested interest in seeing that market forces do not rumble on towards their inevitable conclusion of an absence of young people beyond higher education age. The demographic imbalance is already seeing schools, shops, post offices and pubs closing with those left behind in a landscape with an ageing population. There is a need to assess whether we like the outcomes predicted and then discuss whether there is anything we can do about it. The aim should be a viable and sustainable community.

The question at the centre of that assessment is whether intervention by central or local government is possible, whether it should be done at all, and how can competing interests be resolved. The government will say that it has already intervened into the housing market by introducing measures to reduce the number of unoccupied houses and by encouraging the building of affordable homes for local young people through housing associations. This is undoubtedly true, but it is not enough. Last week it was reported that the desire of the Government to see that social housing rents fell in line with interest payments for mortgage borrowers, would lead to a fall in the already limited funds available for new builds.

The Master Builders also reminded us of the ever present threat to our schools. Having lived in a village where the school was closed there is nothing more effective in killing a community spirit, closely followed by closing the shop, the pub and the church. Twenty percent of us live in the countryside, so why not recognise it as a worthy contrast to the city sprawls of the rest of the nation and try and maintain a healthy inter relationship? If the question has even been considered there does not appear to have been much of an answer as the original life blood of the countryside, agriculture, is seen as a marginal industry. Who cares if 50% of our milk producers have left the industry in the past 12 years or that pig farmers are following suit, or that there are many other products are having to be sold for less than the cost of production? One milk producer whose withdrawal from the industry was reported on Farming Today on BBC Radio 4 this Tuesday (1.9.09) said that he was no longer prepared to do a 70 hour week for £2 per hour. To achieve a sustainable countryside we need affordable housing, and jobs, at least within reach, so that we keep the young families we have. Without children there will be no need for schools and so the possibility of attracting young families who can afford rural properties, will have also gone. Trying to balance these competing elements while preserving the quality of the landscape is by no means easy and it is not surprising that many would rather deal with more easily solved problems. A search under Rural Housing will reveal loads of papers and bodies reporting on the problem. Meanwhile the inexorable forces do their worst in the absence of positive action.

So where should we go from here. Firstly, we should stop ignoring the question and leaving it to the hierarchy. Inhibitions and prejudices about where we are from and how long we have been here must be set aside and, as country dwellers, if we really believe this aspect of civilisation is worth maintaining, we should have a good think and press for change. As a starting point, should you want to be e-mailed a rather long draft discussion paper, please leave a comment.

Dacier