Is this the end of the Great British Boozer?

Pubs are going through a bad patch. Since the beginning of the year, there has been an unprecedented wave of closures, and there are 7,000 fewer pubs in England and Wales than a decade ago. According to the latest figures from Altus Group, the real estate consultancy, there are now just 39,970 pubs, the lowest number on record.

The immediate reasons are plain to see: rising costs and staff shortages on top of an earlier battering during the Covid lockdowns. However, the deeper reasons are more complex and it is often the people who lament the passing of the local pub who have in part caused the decline by taking away their custom. But the story isn’t all doom and there are some fine survivors and some great transformations.

Many of us get distinctly sentimental about pubs. For some they are part of a lost England eulogised notoriously by John Major when he was Prime Minister in the 1990s: a land of cricket on village greens, mediaeval churches set among trees nearby and historic pubs as meeting places for the local community. In some parts of the country, such an England still exists and is often used as a backdrop for murderous encounters in the fictional village of Midsomer and for nostalgic TV adverts with music by Vaughan Williams or Elgar providing a soundtrack. But for most people in Britain today, that soft-focus world has never really existed except on occasional day trips away from the cityscapes in which most of us actually live and where the best of the urban pubs still standing are determined survivors.

Pubs have been on the defensive for at least the past four decades. Britain has changed and pubs have had to change as well, some more willingly and successfully than others. Until at least the 1970s pubs were mirror images of a socially stratified and gender-divided country. It is startling to realise that, in those far off days, women rarely visited a pub on their own. The customers, male and female, “knew their place”. Working men — but no women — frequented the “Public Bar” which had wooden flooring and offered slightly cheaper beers to drink. Through a partition door (or sometimes via a separate entrance) were to be seen the carpeted comforts of the “Saloon Bar” where jacketed men and married or “courting” couples gathered, content to pay higher prices for the privilege. In early episodes of the long-running TV soap opera Coronation Street, there was also a small, separate, area of the “Rovers Return” behind an opaque glass door, known as the “Snug” where ladies could take their tipples discretely. There the redoubtable hair-netted Ena Sharples was to be found drinking a glass of Stout and gossiping with the more reticent Minnie Caldwell. It is a world of yesterday.

Before supermarkets, there were only “off-licences”. Away from the licensed outlets – mostly “Public Houses” but also restaurants and hotel bars – these were the shops where the average person bought the beers, gins, whiskies and cream sherries that were the staple of home drinking all those decades ago. Generally, only the men went to the local pub and stay-at-home-spouses expected a gin and orange, a Babycham or a glass or two of Advocaat as compensation over the weekend. But quite suddenly the traditional pub culture took a hit from which it has never fully recovered. Supermarkets started to sell alcohol which spelt the death knell of “off-licenses” and increased the amount of at-home drinking, instead of at the pub. At about the same time mass tourism took flight and unlike, say, Great Yarmouth, Benidorm sold wines as well as beers and women joined the men and took to drink not just in sunny Spain but in wintery Britain. Home from holidays abroad people wanted opportunities to eat foreign foods and drink foreign drinks. A more sophisticated world of eating and drinking was forming, one which owed nothing to village greens and traditional pubs.

Lovers of traditional beers and pubs fought back and the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) had a genuine impact on what was sold in pubs, including by local and bespoke mini-breweries. A much advertised but dreadful beer called Watney’s Red Barrel became the butt of TV satires including of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It was eventually withdrawn from sale; but thereafter CAMRA’s campaign began to lose headway as larger beers became increasingly popular with young people — female as well as male — who were able to buy them in six-packs from their local supermarket to drink at home or wherever else they wanted. Meanwhile, beautiful pubs were levelled or desecrated as Victorian and Edwardian glasswork and decoration were destroyed by panicked pub-owners seeking to “modernise” public and saloon bars as single spaces with newly installed jukeboxes. The pub as centre of the local community and the main public venue for the sale of alcohol seemed to be on its uppers.

The threat was all too real. Pubs floundered and many are still fighting for their continued existence. The pub has been with us a very long time — alehouses were first licensed in the late 16th century — and has had a long and often chequered history in which cock-fighting and other so-called sports hid in the gardens of drinking venues. Britons have always enjoyed a drink, often quite a lot of drink. Licensing of pubs was intended to impose some order (and secure some tax revenues) and fortified wines and homegrown spirits were added to the ales (which have their origins in Anglo-Saxon times). As Britain industrialised in the 19th century ales offered an alternative to often poor quality water supplies and provided a kind of release for many whose working lives were oppressive. In time ale houses morphed into the pubs that many of us have come to enjoy and treasure.

Despite the present trends and risks, pubs are great survivors. They have adapted to fashions and popular taste. Food was once limited to pickled eggs and pies if you were lucky; but now gastro pubs like the “Sportsman” near Whitstable in Kent, are winning Michelin stars. A myriad of specialist brews have been added to mainstream keg beers, alongside quality lagers from Germany and elsewhere. Wines which once were offered begrudgingly and only in glasses of downmarket table wines (“vin ordinaire”) have been replaced by quality wines from across the globe. Newly minted gins and numerous malt whiskies are as present at the bar as beers and wines; and whereas pubs were until recently never the preferred place to stay overnight, the meld of pub and inn championed by the likes of the Inkin brothers in Cornwall (the “Old Coastguard” in Mousehole and the “Gurnard’s Head” near St Ives) can be found in many places across Britain.  

And some of those formerly endangered Victorian and Edwardian pubs have managed to hold rapacious developers at bay and can still be enjoyed in all their decorative glory. Drop into the “Salisbury” off St Martin’s Lane in central London or the “Lamb” on Lamb’s Conduit Street in Bloomsbury to savour what has been saved. Many other traditional pubs are holding their own across our cities. The best have learned to keep the basics but tweak them to suit contemporary tastes. The “Ship and Mitre” and the “The Railway” in Liverpool both have a great range of beers with inexpensive but good food to accompany. Also in Liverpool, and in an attractive listed building with open fires, is the “The Baltic Fleet” down by the docks and with low prices as an added incentive. Over in Manchester “The Gas Lamp” is a quirky old-style drinking venue with a modern twist whilst “The Marble Arch” brews beers on-site and in their “Tap Room” in Salford, customers can drink their beers alongside the casks in which they settled after the brew.

So the pub isn’t dead yet. Traditional pubs plainly furnished serving quality beers, as well as new-fangled gins, are still flourishing. Others have adapted to provide upmarket eating and quality overnight accommodation. Overall pub numbers have declined greatly and may reduce further as they seek to navigate past rising costs and a prospective recession. The pub will survive in one form or another, but of course, only if the punters are ready to support them and pay the prices that will enable them to do so.