Last orders for the British pub

Dominic Midgley says a great institution of national life is under threat from the credit crunch, the smoking ban and cheap supermarket booze — but there are signs of hope

The sounds of merry-making could be heard from the street as 300 journalists, suppliers and associated hangers-on gathered at The Northcote pub in Clapham last month to toast the opening of Geronimo Inns’ latest outlet. Geronimo’s founder Rupert Clevely, the amiable former marketing director of Veuve Clicquot champagne, was on hand to dole out wine and press the flesh as he celebrated his sixth opening of the year.

All in all, it was like a scene from a film set in a happier world before the term ‘credit crunch’ had been invented. In fact, the British pub — an institution that can claim to date back to Roman times — is in deep crisis. As I write, pubs are closing at the rate of 2,500 a year, or 50 a week, buffeted as they are by the economic equivalent of a perfect storm brought on by tax and licensing changes, the smoking ban, the credit crunch, cheap booze in the supermarkets, and changes in our eating and drinking habits.

And that is something that should be of widespread concern because, apart from the fact that they are a much-loved feature of our national landscape, Britain’s 56,000 pubs employ 600,000 people and contribute an estimated £28 billion to the economy.

For the root of the current difficulties, however, we have to go back to 1989, to Margaret Thatcher’s ostensibly laudable decision to break the big brewers’ stranglehold on the pub sector. The likes of Guinness, Bass and Scottish & Newcastle — who banned their ‘tied houses’ from selling anything but their own beer brands — were forced to sell thousands of pubs in a bid to foster competition in the sector.