Pubs

You won’t find it in any of the ‘best pub’ guides that seem to appear every other week, but our local is the best pub simply because it’s, well, our local. And that is why our village has come together to save it from permanent closure. The White Horse Inn in Westleton – one of around a dozen pubs in Suffolk with that name – was put up for sale last year by the county’s foremost brewery, Adnams, as they looked to slim down their estate. It was hoped that, as with other pubs in the area, some enterprising new owners would come and take it over, tart it up

The mood music around pubs lately has felt as if it were being played by the band on RMS Titanic while the industry goes down with the loss of all hands. Even before the body blow of the pandemic, people were generally drinking less, and more of what they did drink was from supermarkets. Then the spike in energy costs was particularly grave for publicans, who need to heat large rooms for 12 hours a day. Most recently, in the last Budget, they faced a hike in employer national insurance contributions, a parallel minimum wage rise and cuts in business rates discounts – with all of this offset by an insulting

It has been a disastrous summer for France’s restaurants. On average, visits have dropped by 20 per cent on previous years, but at many coastal resorts they’re down by 35 per cent. ‘Consumption is well below previous years,’ says Laurent Barthélémy, president of a hospitality union. ‘Restaurant owners see customers passing by, but they don’t come in to eat.’ Various reasons have been propounded to account for this decline. Barthélémy points to the cost-of-living crisis as a leading factor, as does Thierry Marx, one of France’s top chefs and president of the restaurant owners’ association. He describes a catch-22 situation where restaurants are obliged to raise their prices to cover ‘the

In Bradford a few weeks ago, I popped into a pub called Jacobs Well. It’s a squat old building, all but submerged behind the stultifyingly ugly road that grinds around the edges of the town centre. The Well was fairly quiet on a Monday night, but everyone there was congregated around the bar and it was immediately apparent that this was a place where long friendships are nurtured and strangers are welcomed. There were interesting cask ales, free hotpot and doorsteps of bread on a side table for anyone who fancied a meal, wonderful photos of old Bradford on the walls and a blackboard chock-full of handwritten notices advertising upcoming

The Cherry Tree on Southgate Green began life as a coaching inn on one of the historic routes from London to York and beyond. It has been trading since 1695, when what are now the north London suburbs were open fields. But the other evening, the pub – my local – rang last orders for the final time. The brewery that owns it is having it refurbished as a brasserie, its pub status coming to an end after 330 years. I went on its final evening for the closing-down party. It was like being in an episode of EastEnders, in the sense that it was a pub full of faces

The first months of the year are a tough time to inhabit this corner of the planet. First there’s January to contend with – darker than Himmler’s sock drawer and full to the rafters with post-festive self-flagellation. Then we’re into February, which is just more of the same: January by another name. No wonder the powers-that-be decided to shave a few days off it. Fortunately, salvation has arrived – as it does every year, just when we were nearing breaking point amid the relentlessness of winter. I write, of course, of the Six Nations, a great sporting festival devoted to genial national rivalry and daytime binge-drinking in equal double measures. After all

My local gastropub, which is very popular, serves a hot, freshly made and runny-yolked scotch egg. It’s billed as a ‘Cackleberry Farm Scotch Egg with Maldonado Salt’ because part of hospitality is marketing. If you just chalk up ‘scotch egg’ on a board, it doesn’t entice the appetite in quite the same way. But call it ‘œuf écossais enrobés de chair à saucisse’ and serve it on a cracked slate tile – you’ve got yourself a stampede. A couple who live in the village visited the pub and ordered two of them. Shortly after being served, the husband of the couple returned the plates to the bar and asked the

Entering the New Inn in Llanddewi Brefi in Ceredigion is like stepping back in time. The only pub in the village (since the Foelallt Arms closed down four years ago), The New Inn seems to hail from the 1970s. Its till is a pull-out wooden drawer full of coins and notes. There’s a coal fire in the grate. The bar is littered with eccentric and old-fashioned clutter: a jar of pickled eggs, boxes of Swan Vestas as if smoking in pubs was still the norm, plaques to award the winners of a conker competition long past, sheep farming memorabilia.   The clientele are dressed as if they’ve just got back from marching

Come on in, take a seat, drink deep by the roaring hearth and don’t worry about the time – there’s bound to be a lock-in. Such is the Christmas Eve pub scenario of our fantasies. It’s been a long trek back to our home town, most likely thanks to a ‘cow on the line’ or some such nonsense announced by Avanti somewhere between Milton Keynes and Rugby. But you’re finally home so what could be finer than heading down to your old local for a festive pint or three? Well, quite a lot, actually. Like staying in and sticking hot pins into your retina. Yet out we go regardless, already

Last week saw the publication of the 14th annual Estrella Damm Top 50 Gastropubs of Great Britain, a list consumed by middle-class foodies as eagerly as a £27 fish finger sandwich served on a piece of slate, washed down by a non-alcoholic cocktail in a jam jar. Couples scroll through former drinking holes transformed into Michelin-starred restaurants with ‘wacky’ names such as the Unruly Pig and the Scran and Scallie, noting the ones they have been to and others to put on a gastronomic bucket list – the bucket probably being what their sweet potato fries are served in. It’s a far cry from George Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘The Moon Under

On a recent Sunday evening, the Shaftesbury Theatre in Soho was packed to the gills with a crowd celebrating a dramatic tribute to a landlord: the best kind of landlord, the landlord of a pub. And not just any old pub, but the pub he ruled with an iron fist for 63 years until his retirement in 2006. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Norman Balon, sole proprietor of the legendary Coach and Horses. ‘London’s rudest landlord’, as he was known; it said so on the matchboxes. On for one night only, Norman Balon – It’s All True was a play written by the person who took over the lease, Alastair Choat.

From Geoffrey Chaucer’s Tabard and Martin Amis’s Black Cross to Thomas Hardy’s Buck’s Head Inn, literature is as replete with pubs as are villages and high streets up and down the land. It is no surprise. They are atmospheric settings for a plot, and places of inspiration and contemplation besides; many authors have written their novels while sitting within them. Above all, they are one of the essential stitches in the fabric of British life. In the words of Hilaire Belloc: ‘But when you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves – for you will have lost the last of England.’ Before my father came to this country in

The gastropub, an invention of the early 1990s, is a terrible idea. They burst on to the scene when breweries were made to sell off many of their pubs for a song to make way for competition, encouraging Marco Pierre White wannabes to snap them up and replace cheese sandwiches and pork scratchings with kidneys on toast and anything that could be put together in a kitchen the size of a shoebox. Many of them have food prepared off-premises but charge restaurant prices. There are no proper tablecloths, the glasses are made to survive if dropped on concrete floors and it all feels a bit like going round to your

Eleven days after turning 45, I sent my first ever letter of complaint to the council. A real coming of (middle) age. The topic of my complaint? My local pub. I followed the British protocol for complaining – I made it clear I’m ‘dismayed’ and ‘appalled’ and hope people can ‘see sense’ – about an issue that has instilled such rage in me that a stiff drink is required. You see, my local, the Compton Arms in Islington, north London, is under threat of closure. This is no ordinary pub. Tucked away from the busy stretch of Upper Street, on a picture-perfect back road, is an establishment that has been