Guardian Focus podcast: The future of the British pub

Pubs are too important a part of the national identity for them to almost disappear. But having said that, I had to do a bit of walking around in London the other day to find a traditional pub, instead of all the slickly designed bloody gastro holes that I kept coming across. Paul Kingsnorth's Real England sums up the importance of traditional pubs perfectly.

Though it's not traditional, it would be nice for pubs to allow young children to come in, and not be consigned to the beer garden (which in England's climate tends to be too soggy anyway), at least till say 7 pm (which is when those people who want to get trashed will be in/already drunk).
Obviously i have children and equally obviously I would be responsible for their behaviour

Well if you lot are going to let the traditional English pub die then I won't bother coming back home and the resultant loss of income will make your economy even more stuffed than it is now.

" Suzy Jackson, letting and recruitment director of Britain's largest pub company, Punch Taverns, says good pubs will always survive, but there might be fewer of them – a point echoed by Simon Theakston, CEO of the Theakston's brewery in Masham, North Yorkshire"

Bollocks . If the large pub chains didn`t want such a large cut of the profits and didn`t prefer to sell off the "unprofitable" pubs to developers rather than pub owners a lot more would survive.

It's fair enough to say the pubs are having a bad time because of the recession, but other factors are involved, the smoking ban not being the last of them. I say this not because any pub should be a den of stinky smoke, but that single draconian act has killed off many community pubs.

Smoking is still the preserve of (what's left of) the working class community, and suburban and urban pubs have suffered greatly because of it.

It's fine if the landlord is running a pub with a bit of land - he can build a shelter outside for smokers, and whilst usually cold, it will at least be dry, but for a landlord with an entry to the street and little space out the back that's impossible. Ergo, smokers don't go out to the pub any more.

There are other reasons. The tied house system is iniquitous. I used to run a pub owned by a well known West Country brewer and it was cheaper to buy their beer from a local wholesaler than it was from the brewery, so basically I was being ripped off by the people I was paying rent to. Further, if the brewers are complaining (which they have in the past - I wrote an article for the comment page on this subject about two years ago) about the supermarket competition then perhaps they should think about how much they charge the supermarkets for canned & bottled products they also force landlords to charge double for in their own pubs.

A closed down pub is simply a drain on the brewer's finances. You've only got to look at the 'for sale' list from Fleurets to see how desperate many companies are to get rid of now redundant ex-pubs which have closed in the last few years.

Further, many inner city pubs which have closed down have had police notices that they can only re-open under the change of purpose rules simply because the police don't want the hassle of looking out for another source of trouble. This means that many inner city pubs are not only closed but are crumbling eyesores.

My experience of running a pub is that everyone wants a piece of the landlord's action, whether it's the breweries overcharging for their beer or Sky demanding extortionate prices for things like Prem Plus - my bills in Bath would have been well over £2500 a year - this meant that I would have needed an average audience of 40 people a match to pay for it - not likely except for big games.

The only way for a landlord to justify running a pub is to have the means to run a freehold, and part of the reason so many landlords are getting out is that they are realising that they are getting nothing but a roof over their heads and virtually free food out of the deal (with modern audit systems you don't even get cheap drinks out of it) - saving for retirement is impossible - and in the pub trade you need to be able to save more than in any other - when you retire, your house goes along with your job.

I won't start on Punch Taverns - there lies instant moderation...:-)

Pete

englishrools wrote:

"Though it's not traditional, it would be nice for pubs to allow young children to come in."

Um....no.

Suzy Jackson, letting and recruitment director of Britain's largest pub company, Punch Taverns, says good pubs will always survive ....

The opinion of an employee of Punch Taverns on the future of the British pub is about as useful as Elton John's opinion on living thriftily.

There is a simple solution.

The only retail outlet for alcohol should be the pub. All the profits currently taken by other outlets would be earned by individual pubs. The license should be issued to the current landlord of the pub only, i.e. not to the brewery chain owners. When the brewery changed managers they would have to apply for a new license.

Pubs would boom again and many of the social problems caused by easy access to alcohol would be reduced overnight.

In addition, anyone purchasin alcohol from the pub would have to provide proof of age, if the landlord provided alcohol to those under 18. he/she would lose their license permanently.

Imagine, when you were sent ut to but a bottle of wine, you were 'forced' to stop at the pub too!

How about not charging three to four quid for what is essentially mostly water?

I love pubs, I really do, but there are just too many of them. I grew up around Highgate in London and there were thirteen within a five minute walk of one another. You could lose more than half of them without it being 'the death' of the pub.

Some of the future pubs could well be entertainment pubs where drama students - music students and customers who have a specialist knowledge could perform for the experience of public performance. .
For instance there could also be lectures given by graduates who have yet to be accepted to a university post could well lecture on their chosen subject for the experience of lecturing and performing in public.
A few pubs could connect with colleges to this end.

The only retail outlet for alcohol should be the pub.

I'd say that the US way of selling booze and wine in liqueur stores instead of supermarkets could make a huge difference in many ways. The only downside about this is that we are guaranteed to get more off-license chains than independent stores in our current business model. The Swedish model, however, reeks too much of state control for my taste.

Funny the smoking ban wasn't mentioned in this article, it was only after that was introduced that I started noticing lots of pubs being boarded up. Allow some pubs to be smoking only with smoking personnel or have a separate smoking section and I would bet we will see an improvement in trade. Of course the pubs are competing with supermarkets these days, that is because many people prefer to be able to drink an affordable pint and have a smoke at the same time. Which can now only be done at home...

There are too many pubs that were taken over and started to sell awful beer supplied by one brewery. CAMRA helped roll back the decline a little but, as has already been said, it is only good pubs that will survive. More variety of drink and lower prices would help.

@Tenusbridge,

I hope your had your tongue firmly in your cheek for that one..:-)

There used to be a time when every pub had an offie, but at that time retail in the pub was more-or-less in line with retail elsewhere so there was little price discrimination between the pub and the local supermarkets.

For all booze retail to come from pubs would be wildly impractical - we would need off-sales depts in pubs the size of three aisles in a supermarket - unless we all suddenly decided that Corrida and Hirondelle would do.

We have changed our drinking habits, and to a large extent the pub trade has changed as a result of the increasing fragmentation of society. If I popped round to my next door neighbour and asked him if he fancied a pint he's think I was crazy (not least because he's an RAC man...:-).

So, the pub is now somewhere to go to for a better reason than having nothing better to do - like eat, or celebrate, or watch the game.

Pubs have, however, declined for many of the reasons I outlined above - rapacious landlords, dual standards, uninspiring business practices - like refurbishing places every two years, the continuing drive to take them upmarket (because the working class is skint/fragmented/doesn't exist any more) rather than simply let the corner pub drift along happily in it's own sweet way - a business model that worked very well for hundreds of years).

It is interesting that the best share price to dividend ratio in the pub sector comes from Mitchell and Butler (or did last time I looked). This is because they own most of their estate. Fair enough, they've been pushing the drive to more family orientated foody pubs along with everyone else but they still maintain a huge number of high street boozers who do what they were built to do - flog M&B beer. Punch own few of their pubs and seem to be in a constant state of flux because they are pandering to fashion and the belief that value-added means higher profits. Value added to the punter, of course, means choosing whether to spend £3.00 on a pint of lager after work or £3.50.

My own son's pub was given a facelift last year (and very nice it is too), and despite forcing up the sales by a considerable amount having taken over from a failing manager his latest review has told him to increase his takings by £2k a week. Considering he has punters out on the street most days the only way he can do more is to start doing breakfasts. There lies the burnout of an intelligent, young, affable landlord - as far as the wet trade is concerned he's pretty much at capacity - but they won't let him bring in an ambitious young chef to take the risk on an underused kitchen.

The corporatisation of the pub chains is extremely damaging - there's more concern with control than innovation, and pubs are not like shoe shops - shopping for shoes is a drag, going for a pint isn't.

Pete

As a visitor to England I found pubs as one of the nice things of the English way of living. In France there are the bistros, in Greece the taverns. Large chain stores attack all these. Probably in some years there will be little difference in which place you are.

So what's wrong with kids going into pubs? In some areas the extra trade that would bring could mean the difference between carrying on or being converted into flats.

It's a given that they'd have to be well behaved.

The rest of the world seems to have got their head round it - bars in Spain, France, Portugal, Italy etc would shut within weeks if they banned kids.

Pubs slipping inexorably towards closure haven't really got the luxury of being picky who uses them and contributes towards their profits. Pubs have to move with the times.

Interesting stuff.

Totally agree with many of the postings regarding the big chains. They are the enemy and they hold far tioo much power, just take the example of Worthing’s Half Brick….

http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/4298496.Landlord_s_shock_departure_from_Worthing_pub/

It needs to be made clear that the big chains are de facto real estate owners and as an epilogue to the story above it is still a boarded up shell, it’s so sad…..

Interesting stuff.

Totally agree with many of the postings re the big chains. They are the enemy just take the example of Worthing’s Half Brick….

http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/4298496.Landlord_s_shock_departure_from_Worthing_pub/

It needs to be clear the big chains are real estate owners and as an epilogue to the story above it is still a boarded up shell, it’s so sad…..

TimE wrote:

"So what's wrong with kids going into pubs? In some areas the extra trade that would bring could mean the difference between carrying on or being converted into flats."

You're assuming that people would still want to go to pubs if there were children running around them. I don't think they would.

Which isn't to say that I hate children or families, or that there aren't places where families should be able to go to spend time together and eat and drink, but it is to say that children don't belong in pubs, which are very much adult environments where people go to relax and get away from the endless variety of things that cause them stress and worry in their lives (which can sometimes also include their own kids).

I spent ten days in and around London in August, 1963 when the huge news story was the infamous Train Robbery. As a young GI in West Germany the dollar went a long ways vs the DM and the pound in England. The pubs were very warm and inviting as I met several British soldiers and a young woman I had a fling with. Sure, we have bars in So Calif including San Diego with its sports bars and there are Irish and British themed pubs, but I sure had a great time decades ago during that August.

Obviously i have children and equally obviously I would be responsible for their behaviour

Responsible for their behaviour? That would probably make you unique.

Anyway, why shouldn't pubs be an adult preserve - there are precious few of them.