Welcome back, pubs – we love you
As writers such as Rowan Pelling (above) open their hearts about the pubs that mean most to them, Simon Lewis asks, what’s behind our love affair with the humble ale house?
When John Mills finally gets his glass of lager after a long, deadly trek through the desert in Ice Cold in Alex, he stares for a long time at the settling foam and runs his finger lovingly down the condensation. It’s the greatest scene of delayed gratification in cinema. And it’s how we’ll feel tomorrow when, for the first time in 23 weeks, pubs are once more allowed to serve us.
This is about more than quenching a thirst. “Pubs are the fabric of British society,” says chef Tom Kerridge, who owns two Michelin-starred pubs, and whose Buckinghamshire pub The
Butcher’s Tap reopens for outside dining tomorrow. “The pub is incredibly important, to take a client for a drink or wind down with your colleagues after a hard day. I don’t think we realised until they were taken away how important they are to business.”
Pubs are a hugely important industry, turning over £133.5bn per year. This plummeted to £67.1bn in 2020, with lockdown causing the permanent closure of 10,000 licensed premises according to a report by consultants CGA. So when you take your seat in that
beer garden, you’ll be doing your bit for the nation. There ought to be a poster campaign: “Your country needs you to get a round in.”
Not that we’ll need much persuading. The British don’t just love pubs. In some sense, we need them, thinks Pete Brown, author of Man Walks into a Pub: A Social History of Beer. “We’re a reserved nation,” he says.
“A pub is designed to facilitate social interaction. From the buying of rounds to standing at the bar chatting, we leave our pretensions at the door and socialise as equals.”
As a result of this social mixing, sometimes shockingly in groups of more than six, Brown points out that most of our sports were invented on pub greens and until recently about a quarter of us met our spouses in pubs. “Political organisations met in pubs and before the advent of town halls, you’d hold weddings, wakes and even inquests in the village pub.”
Pubs are so crucial to our island story that Stella Moss, lecturer in modern British history at Royal Holloway University of London, has written six papers on them. “For centuries, pubs were where you went to collect your wages at the end of the week,” she says, “and inns were where people from different classes would be forced to meet and mingle while travelling. Broader societal changes both shape and are shaped by what goes on in pubs.”
So did something in society change last March when the Prime Minister announced he would be “taking away the ancient, inalienable right of freeborn people of the UK to go to the pub”? We’ve stayed in touch with our friends on social media, sometimes with a drink in hand. We survived. Maybe Britain has finally grown out of its love affair with the public house?
Not according to Richard Russell, from Helions Bumpstead in Essex. He was so distraught at the idea of their loss-making local The Three Horseshoes being converted into flats that he clubbed together with other villagers to save it, setting up a mental health firstaid service for isolated neighbours.
“Life has been particularly insular in the course of the last 12 months and I think it’s really highlighted what we’re missing from pubs,” Russell says. “Look at what’s happened – Brexit has actually happened, the American capitol has been stormed… when we talk about these things in the pub, everything is convivial. We part as friends. If all that remains is Twitter, we’re in deep trouble. There’s that wonderful Hilaire Belloc quote: ‘When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves. For you will have lost the last of England’.”
The writers, celebrities and landlords on these pages all agree. Pubs are irreplaceable. When that first ice-cold pint is pulled tomorrow, it won’t have come a moment too soon.