The Decline and Fall of The British Pub

[Anna N]

I come from a family of British publicans. My maternal grandparents and my parents had a pub in Derby called the Blue Bell Inn. It is long gone now as is The  Earl Grey.  (which still had stables in the courtyard although they no longer housed horses).The two pubs were on opposite sides of the same street but had different addresses because of the orientation of the front door. Don’t recall any love lost between the two of them! 
 

My niece and her then husband ran the Brick and Tile for a time and various real and faux aunts and uncles were landlords of pubs in Derbyshire and Lincolnshire. 
 

There were four rooms in the Blue Bell Inn, the larder, the Bar, the Taproom and the Smoking Room (smoking was allowed anywhere so I don’t know why they called this one (very comfortable) a smoking room. 

We, however, a family of six, lived in a single room (three bedrooms were above the pub on the second floor)much of which was taken up by a giant trap door that led down to the cellar. When it was beer delivery day our only room became much smaller as the barrels of beer were rolled in, attached to a block and tackle,  and let down into the cellar.  
 

Whereas many children are encouraged/forced to demonstrate their talents by singing or dancing, my claim to fame was being sent around to announce, “Time, gentlemen, please”. 
 

There is a very small photograph of our pub

Here

The lower window was the taproom and the upper window was my parents’ bedroom. 

This was a working man‘s pub. I saw a number of men who were a little tipsy on their feet, a little loud and a few who would slur their words but I have no recollection of anyone being out-of-control drunk. 
 

We operated on the limited hours mentioned above. 

[liuzhou]

1 hour ago, Anna N said:

There is a very small photograph of our pub

Here

 

Thanks for that Anna. That list of lost pubs is depressingly long, though.

My sister ran a pub for a few years but ran into financial problems and lost it. It has lain abandoned ever since. Sad.

 

[Smithy]

On 6/18/2021 at 10:18 AM, liuzhou said:

 

Thanks for that Anna. That list of lost pubs is depressingly long, though.

My sister ran a pub for a few years but ran into financial problems and lost it. It has lain abandoned ever since. Sad.

 

 

Damn. The pub where I worked one summer, which had been in business since at least 1644, is also gone. 

[liuzhou]

30 minutes ago, Smithy said:

 

Damn. The pub where I worked one summer, which had been in business since at least 1644, is also gone. 

 

Britain has been losing its pubs for years. This BBC article from 2009 says that 52 pubs closed every week. In 2020, with Covid , it is estimated that 6,000 licensed premises were lost, 2,500 of which were pubs. Obviously Covid has had a devasting impact, but the trend was there long before.

I'm working on something longer and more detailed about  pubs and food which I will post sometime in the next few days.

[Smithy]

1 minute ago, liuzhou said:

 

Britain has been losing its pubs for years. This BBC article from 2009 says that 52 pubs closed every week. In 2020, with Covid , it is estimated that 6,000 licensed premises were lost, 2,500 of which were pubs. Obviously Covid has had a devasting impact, but the trend was there long before.

I'm working on something longer and more detailed about  pubs and food which I will post sometime in the next few days.

 

I had no idea about that trend. Thanks for the information, unwlecome as it is.

[liuzhou]

2 hours ago, Smithy said:

Damn. The pub where I worked one summer, which had been in business since at least 1644, is also gone. 

 

I found my sister's canal-side pub on that site, too. It never reopened as a pub after she lost it and, according to that website, is now residential property. There was always accomodation above the pub (where my sister lived, so she also lost her home), so it wouldn't have taken much to convert it, I suppose.

Edited June 20, 2021 by liuzhou (log)

[liuzhou]

12a. The Decline and Fall of The British Pub - The Queen's Fault?

In February 1946, the London Evening Standard published an article by George Orwell (1903-1950) entitled The Moon Under Water. This was a description of his ideal pub. After listing all its attributes, he admitted what

 

Quote

the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place as the Moon Under Water.

 

That article is well-known (and I shall return to it soon), but it wasn’t the first time Orwell had written about pubs and pub culture.

 

Three years earlier, on January 21st, 1943, The Listener magazine had published another article, entitled Review of The Pub and the People by Mass-Observation. Mass-Observation is a UK social research project which originally ran from 1937 to the mid-60s, before being revived in 1981.

 

In his article, Orwell discusses some aspects of the Mass-Observation report on pub culture noting that

 

Quote

...it is unquestionable that in the past seventy years the annual consumption of beer per head has decreased by nearly two-thirds, and it is the Mass-Observers’ conclusion that ‘the pub as a cultural institution is at present declining’. This happens not merely because of persecution by Nonconformist Town Councils, nor even primarily because of the increased price of drink, but because the whole trend of the age is away from creative communal amusements and towards solitary mechanical ones.

 

From the article, it is clear that Orwell sees this as a matter of great regret. I can’t begin to imagine how he would feel today. Since his day, pubs in Britain have been disappearing at an alarming rate. The reasons for this decline are complex, but I’ll try to go through some of the main factors.

 

Hold on for the ride!

1) Social Change and Television

 

Prior to the mid 1950s, the pub was an important centre of the community (even more so than the church). It was where people met, hung out, chatted and socialised in general. It was also where one found one’s entertainment.

 

Pub games were popular – particularly darts, but also games that are all but lost to living memory. Shove-halfpenny was a favourite, as was pool, bar-skittles and dominoes. Three Men’s Morris, draughts, quoits. By the 1980s, only darts and pool remained in the great majority of pubs.

 

Indoor Quoits, or Table Quoits, being played at The Fountain Inn, Parkend, Gloucestershire

 

Pubs were also a music venue. Not hired bands or professional singers, but the community sing-song was very popular, especially after a few throat relaxing beers. There was often a piano (slightly out of tune in all probability) and someone could usually be found to bang out a rough backing to the more popular tunes of the day (or, more likely, decades earler).
 

Note that few of these pubs provided food, or at most only small snacks, but I’ll return to the subject of food in pubs in greater detail in a later post.

 

On the 2nd of June, 1953, Elizabeth II’s coronation was shown live on television by the BBC. This was the first time (obviously) that a coronation had been televised and the common people could see what was happening. (Her father, George VI’s coronation had been broadcast on radio for the first time.) There was a frenzy of television buying just to watch that one 8-hour-long broadcast. 

 

My parents bought our first television the day before! They had a better view of proceedings than most of the congregation in Westminster Abbey, who coudn't see anything.

 

Of course, after the Queen was suitably crowned, people continued to watch television and the entertainment partly shifted from the pub to the home. I’m not suggesting that overnight everyone stopped going to the pub, but many did or went less frequently.

 

1953 televison set.

 

New generations grew up without knowing the old pre-TV culture, so didn’t miss it. Pubs became, to an extent, an old men’s place. I say ‘men’s’ deliberately. In those days, most pubs had two drinking rooms. The “public bar” was the larger and was almost always men only. A smaller, often slightly more well-decorated room, usually with its own entrance, was known as the ‘saloon’ or ‘lounge’ bar and was where women, families and couples were expected to take their refreshment.

 

This discrimination lasted into the 1980s in some pubs. You can still see the old signs indicating the ‘public’ and ‘lounge’ entrances above the doors in many pubs.

 

 

The Lamb Tavern, North Road, London N7

 

The image above shows the closed Lamb Tavern in north London. Established in 1870, this was a place I spent far too much time in during the 1980s. I was working across the road. The ground (first floor) is the pub and upstairs is accommodation. You can just about see a small appendage on the right, behind the yellow sign. This was the slate-grey attached building with separate entrance that was the ‘lounge bar’, a tiny afterthought for the ‘ladies’. The pub closed in 2004, another victim of the trend. It has now been converted into housing.
 

To be continued

Image credits:

1. Indoor Quoits, or Table Quoits, being played at The Fountain Inn, Parkend, Gloucestershire - Public Domain
2. 1953 televison set - Image by Maximilian Schönherr. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
3. The Lamb Tavern. Unknown photographer. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Edited June 25, 2021 by liuzhou (log)

[Anna N]

6 hours ago, liuzhou said:

There was often a piano (slightly out of tune in all probability) and someone could usually be found to bang out a rough backing to the more popular tunes of the day (or, more likely, decades earler).

There were two pianos in the pub where I was raised (discussed in more detail upthread). There was a piano in the Smoking Room and a second in the Club Room.  I have not mentioned the Club Room before. It was a very large room (large enough to  accommodate our very own ghost) on the second floor where our bedrooms were located. It was used for parties, wedding receptions and meetings. 

[liuzhou]

6 minutes ago, Anna N said:

large enough to  accommodate our very own ghost

 

Any decent British boozer needs a ghost! I think it's decreed by Act of Parliament.

[Anna N]

1 hour ago, liuzhou said:

 

Any decent British boozer needs a ghost! I think it's decreed by Act of Parliament.

But we had better claims than most. The pub was situated within spitting distance of Derby Gaol and it was rumoured that the last hangman owned the pub. 

Edited June 22, 2021 by Anna N
Spelling (log)

[liuzhou]

12b. The Decline and Fall of The British Pub - A Bad Business

An article in The Conversation by Liam Keenan, lecturer in Economic Geography (T&S) at England’s Newcastle University, dated July 2020 suggested another cause for the decline in the number of pubs in Britain.

 

Quote

Tens of thousands of pubs have closed since the 1980s, with more than 5,000 pubs lost in the last five years. While changing economic and cultural conditions have contributed to the industry’s decline, research suggests that there is another contributor – pub companies.

 

Pub companies, or “pubcos”, lease pub properties to tenants, who are then contractually obliged to pay rent and purchase supplies from the pub company. This is known as the beer-tie, an agreement that forces tenants to buy beer from their pubco and prevents them from accessing the open market.

Pubcos borrow money to buy pubs, prioritise dividend payments to shareholders, and pay close attention to stock market prices. Their emergence reflects the full-scale “financialisation” of the industry. The term financialisation refers to the growing dominance of finance throughout the economy and society.

 

By 2007, one of the largest pubcos – Punch Taverns – owned over 7,000 pubs with debts of over £4bn. This borrowing enabled pubcos to expand rapidly during the 1990s.

 

The pubco model has come under intense scrutiny since the 2008 financial crisis. Pubcos have sold pub premises in order to repay debts as consumer spending began to fall under austerity.

 

Pubco tenants have voiced concern over high rent and unsustainable beer costs. This is because financialisation places less emphasis on what consumers would expect pubs to do – sell food and drink – and more on growing property values in pub estates and boosting share prices. This has put enormous financial pressures on tenants.
 

Licensed under a Creative Commons license. https://theconversation.com/decline-of-the-english-pub-coronavirus-compounded-the-industrys-problems-141725

 

The rise in the number of Pubcos began in 1989. Prior to that many pubs were owned by the brewers who installed managers to run the pubs. Of course, these managers were tied to only selling the owners’ own products or other products which the owners deemed acceptable – but these, too had to be bought from the brewery and not on the open market.

 

I remember the first time I visited England from Scotland and being confused by the signs everywhere saying “Take Courage”. It turned out these was not some sort of motivational advice but advertising for the Courage Brewery Company, which owned thousands of pubs in England but not, at the time, Scotland.

 

The Boatman, a former Courage pub on Jamaica Rd, London SE16. Closed in 2016 and demolished.
Image by Ewan Munro; licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

 

By 1989, the UK government decided that this practice discouraged competition and so, was unfair to the consumer. So, they introduced new regulations limiting to 2,000 the number of pubs any one brewing company could own. Thousands of pubs had to be sold off and the new pub companies stepped in. There are no restrictions on how many they can own.

 

So, basically the situation was that the pubcos bought thousands of pubs with borrowed money, then with the global financial turndown in 2008 couldn’t repay the loans and so sold off a great number of those pubs, but for the land and property value, not as viable businesses. Pubs were either converted to apartments or more often, simply demolished and the land used to build new housing or offices.

 

The pubcos still exist and are under a lot of pressure from Covid, as are all businesses involved in hospitality – not that the pubcos are primarily hospitality businesses; they are investment businesses. Landlords are also under pressure as many of the pubcos have continued to charge full rent, despite the tenants being unable to trade throughout the three Covid lockdowns Britain has had.

One pub company with more of a background in hospitality is J.D. Wetherspoons started in 1979 by the controversial Tim Martin, which has 925 pubs around Britain as of June 2021. The company specialises in taking over large, empty premises such as cinemas, churches, banks and even a former swimming pool and converted them into mega-pubs. Each pub looks and feels the same (apart from the carpets, which are specially made and unique to each pub), with identical products on sale including a standardised pub food menu across the chain. 13 of the pubs are called The Moon Under Water after Orwell’s fictional ideal pub; none of them resemble Orwell’s description in any way.

 

The Moon Under Water, Balham, London - Image by Ewan Munro; licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

 

If you want to avoid visiting a pubco pub look for one declaring itself a free house. This means that the pub is independent of any brewery or pubco instead normally being owned by the occupants and is free to purchase its wares on the open market. They often have more selection and more interesting choices of beers etc than tied pubs.

 

The Victoria Free House, Barnt Green, England. Image by Elliott Brown; licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

 

to be continued

 

 

 

Edited June 25, 2021 by liuzhou (log)