Whatever happened to a quiet one down the local?

Paul Taylor
Jul 27, 2017 · 5 min read

In my official legal drinking period, 1993 to the present day, the pub industry has changed beyond all recognition. In 2017, it has been decimated and has left a huge void in British society.

Folk have congregated for centuries in drinking establishments for a drink. Today, it seems that most pubs are there for one purpose; to get drunk, or more accurately, get even more drunk. Today, people go out pre-loaded, drunk before they leave the house.

Swaythling, in Southampton, used to have a wide choice of pubs. They weren’t all running at the same time, all the time, but each part of the area had a genuine local, frequented by those that lived on that part of estate. People would often travel a little further than the immediate local, forming bonds with the wider community. Today, it has one pub. The rest are gone, either re-purposed, or outright demolished. Vital cogs of the community have disappeared.

I saw an even more destructive wave of closures in Edge Lane, an area of Liverpool that I lived in for several years. It lost every pub from Holt Road to Cunningham Road, including some outliers such as The Railway, situated just behind the Lane.

I don’t think we realise what we’ve lost. The pub used to be a place where you’d go to have a drink. Go to a pub today, and it’s very easy to conclude that people are there to get drunk. Getting drunk in the old days was always a possibility, but nowhere near a certainty. We used to have the concept of a quiet one down the local. That’s increasingly becoming a thing of the past.

It goes deeper than the quiet pint. Pubs used to be a place where people congregated on the basis of vicinity. A place where you’d see pensioner and teenager supping at the same bar, enjoying a chat. As an outsider to the city of Liverpool, pubs were a lifeline to me in meeting my neighbours, putting names to faces and not just being a random on the street.

Pubs were community glue. We’ve lost that, and we’ve no adequate substitute. We have the Internet, but it’s no replacement for face to face communication and the empathy that you build up one-to-one. There is undoubtedly a keyboard warrior factor at play too, meaning that people often say things online they’d never vocalise in conversation.

When they started to close, every pub that still existed got more dangerous. Hardline drinkers would congregate in the few places that were still open, greatly increasing the chance of trouble. Bouncers are usually the norm, not the exception, in most venues today.

How did we get here?

Many will point to the smoking ban, a decade long in enforcement, as a big contributor in diminishing demand. It’s undoubtedly a factor. While the spritely young things have been perfectly happy to slope outside for a smoke, many lifelong smokers weren’t going to change. It removed part of the attraction of going to the pub, especially as others were seemingly making the same call.

Ten years on, the pub industry has adapted to the smoking ban, with most sensible establishments seeing it as an opportunity instead of a problem. The recent roof garden renovation in The Grapes, Roscoe Street, Liverpool, is an example of how it should be done.

Specifically on closures, some will correctly point to the raw deals that tenants have got in tied pub contracts, prompting many to leave the business, many not of their own volition, bankrupt.

The real problem is the massive disparity in alcohol pricing, You can get two, possibly three beers out of a tenner in a pub. You can get at least eight for that money in a supermarket. This disparity, in a time of austerity, is driving the pre-loaded culture, the reduction in demand, and ultimately, the decimation of the pub industry and a tradition that has been practiced for centuries on this island.

Pub beer has always been more expensive than store-bought stuff, but never to the extent that it is now, with 20% VAT forming part of the cost. The pubs we have now are either amplified pseudo clubs, gentrified boutique numbers or compromised with a restaurant replete with bawling bairns and put upon parents. They are fewer in number, you are more likely to meet strangers than neighbours, more likely to meet violence and always paying more than you would at home.

We’re on the verge of losing something vital, and must find a way to make these businesses viable again. The emergence of microbreweries in the UK is hugely encouraging, but as long as the price disparity exists, folk will be more inclined to stay at home. There are greater overheads, per pint, in the cost of running a pub, than selling beer in bulk at a supermarket.

A competent government could make immediate moves to restore the competitiveness of the British local pub and generate a lot of tie-ups into the bargain. We have a microbrewery industry waiting to expand and a price differential which is always going to limit them, especially when competing against retail multinationals with huge purchasing power, that don’t have to apply VAT to their customers’ food purchases, as pubs presently have to.

There are levers that can be pulled. Relaxing, or removing VAT from pub-bought beer would go some way to addressing the balance. More government intervention in the conduct of overbearing and overcharging corporate breweries, using the burgeoning independent brewing scene as a bargaining counterweight, would also be a good idea.

Mostly, we need to replace what we’ve lost. We need to treat the building of new pubs as a national project. That cannot happen under the crushing weight of present pricing. A brave government would levy tax on supermarket bought beer to assist the independent pub trade.

The best system I’ve ever seen in the UK was illegal, tacitly condoned by the authorities and was entirely a product of its times. In the 1990s-2000s, the Liverpool pub trade consisted of cheap ale and lock-ins. It was not unusual for places to be kicking out their final revellers at 5am in the morning, which actually made life easier for the police. People would leave establishments in dribs and drabs, rather than all at once. My hometown mostly used to kick out on time, pretty much guaranteeing some trouble at the local taxi ranks or kebab emporiums.

In Spain, that system is legal, and while some local ordnance may prevent too much noise in residential areas, most illegal lock-ins respectfully turned the music down at twelve. While the UK has sought to relax licensing laws, extending the times establishments could stay open, that legal benefit was never generally conferred to local pubs serving communities, the vast majority of accepted applications confined to busy city centre venues.

Of course, any article proposing that more pubs need to be built is always going to run the risk of being accused of apologising for alcoholism, but things can hardly get worse than the present situation. Pubs are places people go to get drunk, not a place where people go for a drink, not the glue of a community, not a place where randoms quickly become people you know.

Let’s not be the generation that forgot how to have a quiet one down the local.

UPDATE: The Stile is now faced with closure. Please sign the petition.

https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-the-stile

Paul Taylor

Written by

Coder. Troublemaker. Leftie. Consul at http://sotonians.com/ #saintsfc I used to be such a sweet sweet thing before they got a hold of me

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