I went to the pub at Sunday lunchtime. A couple of quiet pints, followed by ten loud ones, to recycle an old Gareth Chilcott gag. Well, I exaggerate, those days are gone. Unfortunately, they seem to have gone for more and more of us. 

A report in The Sunday Times suggests pubs are closing at a ground-rush rate. Caught in a maelstrom of lockdown, rising costs, rising taxation, declining staff and the mad, bad rent habits of breweries. Chuck in a generation that has apparently developed a fixation on whole milk and believes the “social” bit in social media actually applies and it’s a recipe for a sinking. 

It isn’t entirely new, of course. The village in which I now live was once devoted to hops. The essence and life force of beer. The ghosts of several pubs live on in local houses and, until the sixties, there was a brewery. The landscape is dotted with oast houses – whose conical roofs swing to the wind to dry the hops inside – and much of the land here was owned by the Fremlin family, once a ubiquitous name in Kent brewing. Their name now lives on in a shopping centre in the county town. “Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!” 

At the bottom of my lane are crumbling hop-picker huts, Orwell was once among the occupants,  and an incongruous in-and-out gate on a relative “new build” that was once a heavy horse stable. Most of the surviving pubs in the locale were ale and cider houses until the late 50s. Licensed for nothing else. Tastes changed. Lager hops were grown elsewhere, rural workers departed for the London expansion. No customers for the ale house. Today, you’re more likely to find vines.

The pub I used on Sunday is a short, erm, hop away. It faces a cricket green. To its right, an Anglo-Saxon church and, to the left,  a series of almost fortified farm buildings, bastide style, topped by oast towers. Orchards peep over the hedge and the bowler’s arm if he comes in from the non-pub end.  A snapshot of departed rural life so ideal, it was used for the remake of the Pa Larkin series, Darling Buds of May.

Yet the landlord wants to move on and only a community buy-out stands between the continuation of a hostelry that’s home to a cricket club, a clay shoot, the Sunday walker tribe, ancient bikers on ancient BSAs and, of course, the locals, and it becoming just another house. “Save our pub!” as we all dutifully chorused to the local ITV outlet recently. 

But the point is it typifies. It is a rural pub. Woven from and into a way of life. When I lived in south-east London, the pubs too reflected something. Deptford and parts of Greenwich with their street corner and back alley pubs, The British Sailor, The Hoy (a sort of coastal and inland freighter) where bargees tied up for a livener away from prying eyes. Gone.

Others just had a character that came with their position, the considered Bohemian sparseness of Richard I – now a favoured “mum pub” beloved of the Ashburnham Triangle set. It had a rival, the Fox and Hounds, bang next door. Gone, as is its brewery, Charrington’s.  And the nearby Barley Mow, today is a tapas bar. 

Back in the days where the idea was to grow up quickly rather than linger in perpetual childhood, my school nodded and winked at trips to two locals. One had “A”-level art on the walls and our groundsman at the bar. The painting was done by the son of a London Bridge publican. His old boozer now a Thai gastropub. But both have survived. 

The other, run by the Irish father of a lad in my year – as a brief glimpse at the juke box would reveal. It was dartboards, fags and an outside gents with a corrugated iron roof. It died with the London working class and now hosts a plumbing supplier.  

Where rural pubs have fallen to bankruptcy, gastronomics and drink driving laws, London pubs should have fought more successfully but they’re clearly not immune. Some of the West End “brown” pubs live on. Reaction management will be pleased to hear the magnificent Victorian gin palace, the Lord Salisbury, breathes on as living memorial to what the inhabitants of the rookeries would have seen mirrored, gaslit and gleaming in the slum nights as they headed to Covent Garden music halls. Meanwhile, the Green Man and French horn, a few doors away, is a Greek taverna. 

Even the City has succumbed to sobriety and TWAT (Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays) working. The insurance market fortifies its Leadenhall bastions and the Old Jam Pot off Cornhill but the mahogany haunts of once thirsty Square Mile grow harder to find.

Which forces me to make a stark choice between the remorseless logic of changing times, market forces and the inevitable consequence of that misbegotten lockdown and a melancholy lament for the way we were.

The points are obvious. We navigated by pubs. We met in them. We knew, as we raised a glass, that we followed in a grand tradition and from the beer-stained floor, oozed the very ullage of our forebears. 

Relationships; business, amical and romantic, conspiracies and the stabbing of playwrights, Marlowe in a Deptford tavern,  Greenwich “many a villeyn in” right back to Chaucer and his pilgrims who met, after all, in  a Southwark boozer called The Tabard. Falstaff in his Boar’s Head, Blind Pugh in the Admiral Benbow,  Barbara Windsor; “Get outta ma pub!”

Stitched by centuries into our culture, occupations and surroundings. The Jolly Waggoners, The Forester’s Arms, The Cutty Sark, Stratford’s “thespy” Dirty Duck with Burton glowering on jealously, The Cheshire Cheese and the bottled spirits of Fleet Street. 

What would we change them to now? The Dry January, the Low and No, The Dating App, The Laptop Arms and The Working From Home? Perhaps even in their death, pubs are reflecting British life.

A sad cliché of resort but do we know the £7-a-pint cost of everything and the value of nothing?

There are 45-odd thousand left. Some 30,000 fewer than the mid-Seventies. An attrition rate to frighten Bomber Command or the boys on the Somme. “Save our pubs” while you still can.  We won’t know what we’ve lost till it’s gone.

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