Good riddance to stinking old boozers

by Chris Losh

Almost without fail, whenever my wife and I watch a historical TV programme, at some point she will turn to me all starry-eyed and say ‘Ah, it must have been great to live in the Victorian/Edwardian/Elizabethan/Mesolithic period...’ (delete as appropriate). My response to this is usually a grumpy ‘no it wouldn’t, they didn’t have electricity/cars/Nintendo Wii/water.’ (ibid).

I remember my old man telling me about waking up in the mornings to find ice on the inside of the window, of having to lay a coal fire first thing in the morning, of basically living in one room because the rest of the house was so bloody cold. This was only 60 years ago, but it seems like a lot longer, and I doubt, beyond the swivel-eyed green ink brigade who write to the Daily Mail that anyone is pining for the days of the 1940s or 1950s.

I mean, sure, it was nice to know your neighbours, and leave your back door unlocked, but if you had to eat newspaper to survive, I think I’ll take the venal, unfriendly, curry-and-ready-meal noughties, thanks.

It’s one of the reasons that I’m always a bit sceptical when I hear some spokesman or other bemoaning the fact that pubs are closing at the rate of ten a day or whatever it is.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s never nice to see people’s livelihoods disappearing, and I appreciate that many of these ex-publicans will be honest, hard-working people who sweated blood to make a go of a business that just couldn’t compete with DVDs, cut price supermarket take-outs and general British apathy when it comes to going out.

But I also have to say that the majority of pubs I’ve seen close down in the last few years were the kind of places that I wouldn’t have gone in if you’d paid me and offered me free drinks all night: tired, feculent places where three dissipated old joskers stared into their pints and munched packets of cheese and onion until they lost control of their bladders and squelched off home.

They had as little atmosphere as they did charm, nothing decent in the way of food, and, unless you liked drinking the same crappy beers that were on offer in every other pub in town, but with a smell of old carpet thrown in, no reason whatsoever to visit.

In Shoreham, where I live (a town with a thriving pub culture, incidentally) three of these places have closed down in the last two years. One has been demolished and turned into houses; one has become a rather good Italian restaurant that is packed every night; and one has become a big, airy family pub that does a roaring trade in pretty decent pub lunches at the weekend, and attracts groups of predatory divorcees in the evening. 

All are better than what was there before them, not least because they offer a service that people actually want to use. As many imbibe readers would attest, you can get Brits to prise their buttocks off the sofa, but you need to give them a reason.

Life has changed. And yearning for the days of the dark, fetid ‘vertical drinking’ boozer is a bit like pining for the horse-drawn carriage. Some will survive, but in nothing like the numbers that they did 20 years ago.

And while my wife might get all starry eyed about the days when flat-capped men got together to drink pints of mild and discuss horse racing, I certainly won’t mourn their passing.

1 comment

Mark D. 20-08-2010

There are some old spit ‘n’ sawdust type pubs I miss, such as the Intrepid Fox in Soho. I'm not for gentrifying for gentrifying's sake. But a failed business is a failed business. What next nationalise the pub industry?

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