Called to the bar

If you’ve missed the endless articles whingeing about pub closures, it must be because you’ve been too blotto to focus. It is impossible for a mediocre drinking hole to close its doors for the last time without some thirsty hack reaching for his collected George Orwell essays and waxing lyrical about the Moon Under Water and the death of the English pub. It’s true that many pubs are closing (27 a week, according to the Campaign for Real Ale) and demographic changes have called last orders for numerous decent pubs — and some gems — in areas where changing populations have seen demand dissolve quicker than a morning Alka-Seltzer. But the main reason why most pubs closed is simple: they were dreadful.

When I consider all the bad pubs I’ve frequented it’s hard to select the worst. I might have cited a certain moth-infested dive in Kennington, but so many letters had fallen off its sign I’m not sure what it was called. Another horror was a pub in Portsmouth where on arrival we were greeted by two growling rott-weilers (chained, fortunately) and an elderly customer in the corner who appeared to have wet himself. Both those pubs have closed — mercifully — but of the rest that have survived, what is it that distinguishes the great pubs from the mediocre? The Lagavulin 16 from the own-brand blended cough mixture?

These days, it’s not really about the beer — that battle has largely been won. Even grim chain pubs sell craft beer and the days when it took serious research to find a decent bitter are long gone. For me, at least, the mark of a good pub is not its look or its location. There is something to be said for a village inn where your pint of foaming ale is brought to your table next to an open fire, but it’s as easy to have a great time in a 1970s estate pub, if it has the right atmosphere.