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The Lost Village

Llamas but no locals

Richard Askwith
Ebury Press, 356pp, £18.99,

P.J. Kavanagh

Wednesday, 7th May 2008

P.J. Kavanagh reviews two books which deal with English community

The 1989 ‘Beer Orders’ decreed that no brewer could own more than 2,000 pubs. So the brewers created PubCos — stand-alone pub companies which were not brewers and therefore exempt … Today the PubCos own around 20,000 pubs, are multinational conglomerates with no particular attachment to anything but their shareholders.
They put in managers instead of tenants, make their pubs uniform in decor and stock. When Kingsnorth wanted to take a photograph of the interior of a Weatherspoons, he was told by the manager that he had to telephone the ‘media team’ at head office — of a pub!

George Monbiot says, ‘This is an urgent, important book.’ It certainly is if, as Kingsworth says,

six urban locals close every week, often replaced by giant, town-centred binge-drinking sheds known in the trade as ‘high-volume vertical drinking establishments’.

No chairs, because the more you sit the slower you drink. Zac Goldsmith, director of The Ecologist, says ‘this book should be read by everyone’. Maybe it should, if you are young and have energy to try to stop all this. If you are older you have a temptation to pull the bedclothes over your head or go out and sample what little remains while it still does — which I intend to do. My local is owned by a family brewers (Arkells) and has not changed so far, though it has to be said there are fewer and fewer people in it. Beer in the supermarket is a third of the price — to buy and drink alone at home? As Kingsnorth remarks, ‘This is the greatest social change since the Norman Conquest.’

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