IF VILLAGE PUBS DIDN’T EXIST, WE’D HAVE TO INVENT THEM
Action is needed, says Martin Hesp, if we are to save the good old British country pub – the vital hub of our communities
YEARS ago, I found myself living in a vast, sprawling American city. Within a few weeks of moving there I wanted out. It wasn’t the ugliness of the urban sprawl, or the endless noisy highways, or the sound of police sirens at midnight. It was the total lack of any sense of community.
I was remembering the desperation I felt when it came to escaping Houston, Texas, as I wrote a news story about how the Campaign for Real Ale descended on Westminster calling for MPs to do more to protect traditional pubs.
Our story talked about how some village pubs in the rural West Country act as the only community-based businesses or buildings left operating in many parishes.
But as 18 pubs in Britain shut up shop for good each week, it seems many such places with small, rural, customer bases could soon be threatened.
Four decades ago, in that Houston suburb, I remember feeling very homesick when imagining a nice, cosy, friendly, British pub. There weren’t any in urban Texas, as far as I could make out. The only local bar was a country-and-western joint where a lethal fatal shooting took place one night just minutes after we’d left the place. Needless to say, I was in no hurry to go back.
I dreamed of sipping a pint in a friendly British pub, which – for most people back in the late 1970s – represented the kind of institution that was nailed on to the Earth’s surface forever and a day.
Just about everyone except for a crazed Bible-thumping teetotaller would have assumed that there would always be pubs in every community in the British Isles. Now we’re seeing them drop like flies that have been gorging on spilt beer.
There are plenty of reasons why, and even life-long pub fans like me are to blame. Or so I thought as I lounged on my sofa one filthy night last week. A gale was raging, and there was me tucked up by the log fire with a glass of good beer I’d bought from a supermarket at less than half the price the same pint would cost in a pub.
Was I feeling sad and alone? No. My vast flat screen TV was showing me the latest box set in ultra-high definition – and damned good entertainment it was too.
Four decades ago. I wouldn’t have had a chance of purchasing a reasonable bottle of beer from a supermarket. Indeed, there weren’t many supermarkets in which to buy anything.
And I certainly wouldn’t have been watching endless good quality entertainment on my tiny, fuzzy, black-and-white TV. “Nothing to do, nothing to watch, nothing to drink, feeling a bit nippy… Might as well go down the pub.” That was how it went for me in the 1970s and ’80s.
Nowadays, it is all too easy to stay at home. Especially on a stormy winter night.
But the combination of cheap but good supermarket beer, Netflix, and effortless comfort and warmth do not make up for a dose of human interaction. We humans are hardwired to be community-minded creatures. Endless academic studies have shown how we thrive as social animals, but fail as isolated loners.
There are many people who live and work in the countryside who do not see anyone outside their immediate family during the average day. Me included. And there’s an increasing number of employees (like me) who work from home.
In many rural communities, the village shop has already gone, the church is only used once a month, and then it’s more than half empty, and the bus service is history. If the pub is the only community business or building left in daily operation, then we must use it or lose it.
I asked my old friend Patrick McHaig McCaig who runs Otter Brewery (which sells most of its beer through public houses in the South West) what he thought.
“If the pubs and bars are to remain at the heart of our community, they must be affordable places to go,” Patrick shrugged. “Since the off-trade (off-licence) was ‘opened all hours’, the prices of take-home beers have dropped like a stone, which has provided a cheap alternative to the pub.
“Customers make pubs work,” said Patrick. “Without customers, landlords are forced to increase prices to cover cost and struggle to maintain fresh quality products on the bar.
“While the Government continues to bow to the large multiples, delivers sticking-plaster business rate cuts, ignores the consequences of binge-drinking and fails to recognise that our pubs offer a responsible place to consume alcohol, I’m afraid we are in a very tricky situation.
“For goodness sake, crank up the price of booze in the supermarkets to raise tax and make it less accessible,” he boomed.
“This will reduce the (alcoholrelated) costs on the NHS and prompt the responsible majority to have a pint or two in their local where drinks can be sold at a sensible price because the Government has fairly assessed business rates and alcohol duty – so the landlord can run a sustainable business.”
I echo Patrick’s words here because I do not ever want to find myself living in a kind of soulless West Country version of a Houston suburb. We need social interaction even more than we need beer – and if country pubs didn’t already exist, we’d have to invent them.