Yet it seemed to me an unfair exchange, all that cunningly distressed wood and hey, how are you guys doing today, where there had once been a place full of intrigue and nuance and everyday mystery. I would look at my grandmother, sitting with the plate of king prawns that she now always demanded, offering up her ritual comedic rebuff to the question of whether she wanted a glass of water – ‘only for washing in’ – at which the nice young Badoit-flourishing waiter would look blankly perplexed, as one unsure whether or not a joke had been made, and indeed whether or not water was actually wanted by this strange, splendid, alien lady. Despite the flat vanilla sheen that the strip lighting cast over her face, I seemed to see the flickering play of memories, of Wheeler’s, Isow’s, Sheekey’s, Jack Straw’s Castle, the old pub. Sometimes she was unable to restrain herself. ‘Not much, is it?’ she would say, casting around her a look of cheerful benevolent contempt. The new managers did not know who she was, and this liberated her. She accepted her own obsolescence with the lively stoicism that characterised her. She accepted change with a shrug. ‘Oh, it’s a different world, I know that.’
She could not, however, accept the smoking ban. It didn’t affect her. She had given up cigarettes a couple of years before they killed Irene, because it had seemed that she herself was the one who was suffering: every winter she was racked with an increasingly cruel bronchial cough, terrible sometimes to hear. When she left the pub, this eased immediately. My father smoked, but he alone could not create the grey mushroom cloud that had hovered over the bars at night. Nevertheless, my grandmother refused to believe in passive smoking – bronchitis was different, she said – and anyway took the view that everybody died of something, and if it wasn’t fags it was probably booze or grub or bad bloody luck. She was roused to Chestertonian rage by what she saw as an attack upon freedom, and upon what was left of the pub as she had known it. ‘Can’t smoke in a pub?’ The images of her old home – the nicotine-dirty ceilings, the men communing intently with their pipes, the women puffing smartly on their B & H, the packets of Player’s Navy Cut crumpled in the ashtrays, the blue gauze threading through the spirals of sound in her little sitting room – they were all wrapped in that lethal and lovely fog. Smoke was of the essence, it was the essence, and without it the pub was no longer the pub.
For all her liberalism, my grandmother was not politically correct. This mindset seemed to her quite natural, although today it would be regarded as a contradiction in terms. How could a person be without race bias – say – yet believe that a pub was a masculine environment? Which she did, unquestioningly. Pubs had a place for women, but they were places for men. Her own pub, for instance, was her personal stage. Yet she would always say that when she entered the public bar on an early Friday evening – when it had become, tacitly, the personal stage of a group of businessmen relaxing jovially over their first pint of the weekend – then the atmosphere tightened: the men became gallant, welcoming, they couldn’t have been more pleased to see her, but in a barely perceptible way the fun was over. ‘Oh they all loved me,’ she said irritably. ‘I know that, but they were much happier on their own.’ This wasn’t always true, of course. But she was right about this particular configuration of men. Nowadays such an idea would be regarded as an outrage; although in fact it was because these men were polite, and made her the instant focus of their gathering, that the atmospheric shift occurred – if they had chosen to ignore her, they could have carried on regardless with their happy nonsense. And indeed the arrival among them of a boring, miserable man would have destroyed their evening far more conclusively (although more effective still would have been the arrival of one of their wives; not because she was unwanted per se, just at that particular time).
This kind of thing, which is actually rather subtle, is now forbidden to be so. From it has arisen an image of the pub, the true pub, as a place full of blokes rendered metaphorically redundant by the brave new world, in which a landlord shakes his head over health and safety gone mad and the customers plot a sullen, xenophobic revolution of the little people that will proclaim the right to buy pork scratchings in ounces rather than grams. This pub – let us call it the Farage Arms – assuredly does exist. It is like any bad pub: colonised by its members and resistant to outsiders. It is therefore unlike the true pub, in which everybody is theoretically a member (not that this nirvana is always attained, but it is the unstated aim). Yet as modernity continues its march upon the pub, bleaching its beams and serving its food on artists’ palettes, so the image of the pub as it was, in the evil old days, has become ever more identified with smoke, drink-driving, men without women: all that is past, all that is wrong, all that needs to be purged.
And again, there is some truth in this. But it is not that simple. Pubs were not simple, however much they could resolve complexity. My grandmother could not have ‘defended’ her belief in cigarettes, a few beers before driving, men drinking together and so on – at least not in the language of today because she would not have seen it in those terms. She could, however, do something that has become rather rare: she could separate the personal from the politicised. To her, a man who wanted a drink alone, without his family, was no more or less than that: he did not symbolise a host of other attitudes. Only if such a man were to transgress in some other way – behave, for instance, like the man who sought to become my ‘uncle’ – only then would she rear up and judge. Otherwise it was life, the imperfect business that the pub was there to accept. Those who sought to make life into an image of itself, and whose thought systems adhered to an ideal of perfection, were not her kind: they were not pub people.
I was with her. The influence of my past was very strong. By that time I was finding a blessed continuum with the world that she had created, drinking in places like the French House, which still contained men who would introduce themselves as a descendant of Brian Boru and take one on to the Colony (no Muriel any more, but all the same); or the Coach and Horses, where one could watch an afternoon’s racing from a tattered seat with a half-pint of wine and Jeffrey Bernard in one’s eyeline; or a couple of the pubs in Newmarket, where people in the know would describe the potential Guineas winner they had seen on the gallops that morning, but more importantly would talk about something other than themselves, something that lit a quick, unexpected flame. These pubs had their centrality, their point. They were about something more than going out in order to use up a few hours in a slightly different way. They allowed an evening to bend and breathe, as it rarely does in the known worlds of social congress, where the moment of leaving is so often the most pleasurable. Such pubs are still not quite extinct, but they are rare beasts.
Racing pubs are interesting, because horse racing (like dog racing) has much in common with the pub. Racing, too, believed unquestioningly in its power to absorb people’s attention, to compel their love. It too was once so healthy as never to think about death. Now it staunches the constant slow ebb of its lifeblood. When my grandmother went to Epsom in the 1930s, the country stopped for the Derby; today almost nobody outside the sport would know the name of the most recent winners (Wings of Eagles, 2017, anybody?), and there is very little to be done about this. One cannot force a nation to bow down before an entity simply because it was once a national institution.
The solution of the racing industry has been to sell itself as something other than racing. It attracts large crowds to major meetings because these have been fundamentally reconstituted: they are open-air malls, places where people can dress up, go on the pull, buy stuff, get their nails done, watch a band, eat and, above all, drink until they fall over. Very few of these people look at a horse. Their attention is back where it wants to be: on themselves. But at least they are there, rather than at one of the thousands of other places that they might be. In a society in which life often resembles a multiplicity of open browser windows, there is logic to the idea of making everything like everything else.
Thus with the modern pub, which does so much that is not pub-like, a
nd keeps alive by so doing. Yet this philosophy – that survival depends upon attracting those who do not care whether or not you survive – has generated an opposite reaction: a passionate yearning towards authenticity. The genuine racegoers – whose view of the course is obscured by people pointing their phones at a Royal Box containing Harry and Meghan – will gravitate to the purity of the Newmarket gallops at dawn. The genuine pub lovers – whose drink with a friend takes place to a jabbering soundtrack of, ‘And what is the only sequel to have won the Oscar for best picture?’ – will seek out the microbrewery, the craft beer tasting.
The pub is dying. Yet so many people seem to want it to stay alive. Every week more than twenty pubs close, yet one regularly hears the story of a particular pub’s fight for life. The notion of the pub as the ‘hub of the community’ – again, an idea rich in authenticity, reminiscent indeed of the great old inns – has taken a hold upon our collective consciousness. Now that almost half of our smaller villages have lost their pub, the desire to save those that remain is becoming a minor crusade. The sense of what is being lost has been recognised, which does not mean that it will be prevented.
The paradox about authenticity is that it, too, can be commodified. Therein, perhaps, lies the pub’s best chance of survival. A perfect metaphor for this was created when a generic London pub (the sort that looked as though it had, in its time, been a proper old boozer) was demolished by a property development company, even as it was in the process of acquiring listed status; local residents took the cause of their pub to Westminster Council, and the developers were ordered to rebuild the pub, brick by brick, sign by sign (SPARKLING ALES; LUNCHEON AND TEA ROOM), remaking it in every detail as it once had been. This is a wonderful story, of course: a triumph for the London of heterogeneity against the crass grab of the corporate. Nevertheless, this pub can never truly be remade as it was; it will become a facsimile, a totem, too valuable as a signifier to retreat into the pub’s sacred shuffling ordinariness. That quality, that reality, is what cannot be replicated.
This, after all, is a world in which a Chinese investment company bought the Plough pub near Chequers, after it was visited, in 2015, by the then prime minister David Cameron and President Xi. The intention was not to turn the pub into flats, not to destroy it, but to glorify it: to capitalise on the status of a venue where the two leaders partook of fish and chips plus pints. ‘The English pub concept is growing very fast in China,’ said the company’s managing director. A chain of Plough-like establishments is now projected to be built in the country. The pub is regarded as a place in which to do business but, more than that, it is an attraction. It has theme-park status. Again it is a facsimile, a totem: this time of Britishness, like a double-decker or a bulldog. That is why Madonna, in her country-tweed phase, bought the Punch Bowl pub in Mayfair, and why Tony Blair took George W. Bush (a teetotaller) to the Dun Cow at Sedgefield. Would David Beckham buy a pub? He might, if public interest in his fate remains a fashionable concern.
Which it may not, of course, which anyway makes scant difference to the vulnerability of many pubs. In 2016 the government declared a desire to staunch the haemorrhage – some 8,000 have closed in the past decade – and introduced a ‘pubs code’, which allowed tenants or mortgagees of tied houses (as my grandmother had been) to apply for the right to become a free house. Without the tie to the brewery, the publican could buy beer from any source and at a cheaper rate. It is not unlike the legislation that enabled people to buy the freeholds of their properties; and, unsurprisingly, the large pub companies went into action. The terms for breaking ties were made so harsh as to be almost prohibitive. A case was cited in which a putative ‘free-of-tie’ rent was raised to almost £50,000 a year, double what was being paid by the tied tenant.
Then came ‘reforms’ to business rates, leading to increases so extreme as to make national news. This tax had wrought destruction upon pubs in the 1990s, when they were far less beleaguered; yet some landlords were advised their rates would increase by as much as 150 per cent over the next five years. Again the government offered help – a discount for almost every pub in the 2017 Budget – along with a recognition that the system of business rates needed reform. Nevertheless, the position is now one in which any further pressure could close even a thriving, well-run pub.
Since the 1990s, an alternative fate has been absorption into the maw of a company like Wetherspoons, Enterprise, All Bar One, Greene King or Punch Taverns, which now own around half of our pubs. Such is the success of Wetherspoons (almost 1,000 establishments in its ownership in 2017) that, in reversal of the usual trend, it reclaims buildings such as post offices and cinemas, and turns them into pubs. The dominant chains have also bought up large quantities of failing pubs, often from regional breweries.
Some chain pubs are tenanted, some managed. Some retain their own character. But many are homogenised spaces; almost unrecognisable as pubs, in fact, with the divisions between bars ripped away – separation of that kind being not modern – and, with that literal removal, the pub’s implicit guidelines also lost. In those amorphous anterooms anything seems possible: a demonstration, an orgy, a mass gin-palace-style brawl. Thus the tension between freedom and restraint, the sense of pleasure being authorised, evaporates into the smokeless, vacuous dark.
This feeling I had, that the true ‘pubs code’ was disappearing as if it had never been, was intensified by the Licensing Act of 2003, which dispensed almost completely with the concept of opening and closing times. I always assumed that there was a real, hidden, commercial reason behind this legislation, because it seemed utterly impossible that anybody could be so naïve as to accept the stated reason: that all-day and all-night drinking would mean no more drunkenness. Instead people would pace themselves, knowing that they would not be turned into an alcohol-filled pumpkin that would splatter on to the pavement and upset the neighbours. There would be no need to choke down one, or five, for the road, because the road would have been existentially extended. The pub would, in fact, be smoothly annexed by the cosmopolitan, café-society culture of Cool Britannia, and these words of Patrick Hamilton would become merely a part of prehistory:
A horrible excitement was upon everybody and everything … they beat their palms with their fists, and they swilled largely and cried for more. Their arguments were top-heavy with the swagger of their altruism. They appealed passionately to the laws of logic and honesty. Life, just for tonight, was miraculously clarified into simple and dramatic issues. It was the last five minutes of the evening, and they were drunk.
Well, they are still drunk. On the pavements, on the racecourses, on the beaches, at the football, the cricket, the clubs. It frankly amazes me when I read – as I did in early 2017 – that spending on alcohol had almost halved in the past fifteen years. Perhaps I go to the wrong places. Perhaps statistics are not always wholly accurate. It is true that there are factors in which one can believe: the rise within the population of religious non-drinkers; the rise of abstinence within the clean-living, clean-eating, quinoa-Instagramming young; the rise, indeed, of twenty-first-century temperance. Nevertheless… what of the tumbling, staggering bodies outside those cavernous chain pubs, the lurching figures who thump the windscreen as one inches through London traffic on a Saturday night, the glasses thrust into the camera lens at Aintree or Magaluf? These people, at least, are keeping up their drinking, thank you so very much: and these half-naked cavaliers are no more use to the pub than the new puritans.
Save our pub, people say. What do they mean by it? Are they dreaming of a new culture, a local clothed in the loose disguise of the pub: a place in which to meet, eat, drink beer flavoured with coffee and gin spiked with thyme, use a library, buy milk, tend allotments between lattes, play Monopoly, have a sing-song? The examples of ‘community pubs’, of pubs reclaimed and remade by the people who use them, are very much like that. They are smiling, friendly, family places, in spirit not unlike George Orwell’s The Moon Under Water, which was perhaps conceiv
ed some seventy years ahead of its time. As with the restaurant-pubs, some of which are undeniably charming, they represent an evolution that makes societal sense. Customers want them, they take shares in them and put their best selves into them. This may not be enough, financially speaking, but they represent a continued life for the pub: one that is – ‘authenticity’ again – a reassuring retreat to the world of the medieval inn, with its all-purpose community aspect, just as microbrewers and micropubs (in which two or three customers congregate around a beer tap) represent a reversion to the artisanale world of the ale-wife and alehouse.
I am so glad that all this exists, that there is a will for it to exist. These places are a defence against the deluge. They are not, incidentally, my own idea of pubs. They are simply too nice. I always liked a slight tautening in the diaphragm before entering a pub, even my grandmother’s. And I suspect that others share that view, almost without recognising it; that their attachment to the pub, their desires for its salvation, lie in something more numinous and mythic, in fact in a series of images: of sodden beer mats, foaming pints, velveteen seats the colour of week-old rioja, dark wood pierced with a clean sliver of sun, dust motes rising to greet the morning’s first customer, a shaft of shadowy promise seen through an open door, a bar like a shining dressing-room mirror framing a landlord, a landlady. Images that in reality would no longer mean what they once did because the reality around them is no longer the same.
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