ROUGH DRAFT
Pubs survived the Black Death to become Britain’s third-biggest tourist draw. Will more al fresco drinking save them, and Canadian bars, from this latest plague?
News that one of my favourite pubs has shut permanently has not only left me in a state of dry anguish, it has made me pine for a time in late 1990s Britain when the talk was not of dreary, interminable lockdowns but the joyous conspiracy of the “lock-in.”
A lock-in was a quaint custom that thrived before the relaxed liquor licensing regime ushered in by Tony Blair’s New Labour government in 2005. It was simple enough: pub landlords could extend the hopelessly early closing time of 11 p.m. with a wink and a nod from half-sozzled punters, a deft drawing of the blinds, a firm bolting of the doors and a chorus of huzzahs from the bar stools.
A sort of breezy English speakeasy, the pub lock-in led to a doubling of one’s drinking rate — by way of saying thanks for the private party — and discreetly raised glasses from afar by your fellow punters. Social distancing well before it was fashionable.
In Britain, their spiritual home, bars have been closing at a rate of roughly 14 a week since well before Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered them shuttered in March, acknowledging that the coronavirus-inspired ban struck at “the inalienable, freeborn right of people born in England to go to the pub.”
It’s not just the British who love their pubs. Surveys by tourist agency Visit Britain have found that supping at alehouses, hundreds of which are more than 200 hundred years old, ranks third in popular holiday activities, ahead of traipsing around historic houses and castles and behind only shopping and eating in restaurants.
“This is an absolutely devastating moment for the sector,” Emma Mcclarkin, the chief executive of the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA), told the Financial Times. “These were businesses already operating on the tightest of margins.”
England’s “oldest bar” — though that title is notoriously hard to authenticate in a land where hundreds date themselves by centuries rather than decades — is itself facing “last orders” if lockdown restrictions in the U.K. last much longer. Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, in the town of St. Albans north of London, has been pulling pints for 1,200 years and has survived the Black Death. It draws a third of its trade from tourists.
But landlord Christo Tofalli worries this latest plague, along with a stay-at-home culture likely to become further embedded once the health crisis abates, could see him bolt the doors forever.
“I’m not a roll-over-and-die kind of guy,” he told the FT. “But I’m dead in the water here. I’ve got 30 quid (CDN $51), left on my credit card, which I saved to put fuel in the car.”
Pubs in Britain, too, are the refuge of the eccentric. They prop up bars across the land, from the “weirdy beardies” of the Campaign for Real Ale to the barkeep at the Poltimore Arms in Devon who dresses up as 18th century highwayman Dick Turpin, treats his guests — be they royalty or chimney sweeps — as bothersome annoyances and dotes over a resident cat called Hitler. “There’s a lot of banter but nobody gets offended,” one regular told the Daily Express.
Speaking of cats, the Seven Stars pub just off Fleet Street in London used to be the domain of the exquisite Tom Paine, who wore a snowy white Elizabethan ruff and would casually pad up and down the bar studiously shunning attempts at chin rubs, barring those proffered by the proprietor, Roxy Beaujolais.
The pub culture is not as ingrained in Canada, yet we’ve embraced the bar patio as our own. It is the siren song of spring, drawing us into the open after long winters laid low by cabin fever, never felt more acutely than now, and there are growing calls in Ontario and elsewhere to expand al fresco drinking to include sidewalks, underused parking lots and even closed streets.
It’s particularly important to tourist-dependent towns like Port Hope and Cobourg along the shores of Lake Ontario, where restaurateurs in heritage buildings are stymied by lack of space along their Victorian main streets.
David Piccini, the MPP for Northumberland-peterborough South, said there is no time to waste.
“Our tourism sector is critical for our broader economy, so this move is something I wholeheartedly support,” he told the Globe and Mail.
In the U.K., it’s estimated more than half of the country’s 47,000 pubs have beer gardens or other outdoor spaces and these could be allowed to host physically distanced drinking as early as July 4.
“We want to explore all opportunities for our nation’s pubs to reopen safely and viably as soon as is possible,” the BBPA said.
Drinking at home is an option for many, but it lacks what makes the pub special in the first place: serendipity.
Walking into a pub is to walk into an unexpected party that you can drift in and out of without excuse. It’s the reward at the end of a hike, the punch-clock to the work day, the lost-in-a-crowd hearth for the single traveller. It makes the world a little brighter.
As Ray Milland’s character said to the man behind the dive bar in the 1945 film The Lost Weekend: “And out there it’s not Third Avenue any longer; it’s the Nile, Nat. The Nile and down into the barge of Cleopatra.”
How many more pubs will go the way of my local, which had loyally served its constituents for more than 30 years before making the stunning announcement that it was closing for good?
More to the point, how many plague-weary drinkers will venture out to sit among the “friends we’ve never met” — as the bar cliché has it?
I know where I’ll be when the taps are flowing again. First in line. Even if it means trussing myself up in a full haz-mat suit.
By the way, it’s your round. Cheers.