Up in smoke

During the last week there has been a lot of media attention over the fate of the Glynne Arms (aka “Crooked House”) at Himley on the fringes of the West Midlands. This well-known pub was severely damaged by fire and then the following day was completely demolished by its new owners in blatant contravention of planning regulations. On the face of it, it is a glaring example of the phenomenon of the “mystery fire” which can be a very convenient way of getting rid of closed pubs and, unsurprisingly, it has become something of a cause célèbre and triggered a national wave of outrage.

However, when the news was first announced that Marston’s had sold the pub off and it had closed, the general response was one of philosophical resignation. While it was a distinctive and quirky building, the actual pub operation wasn’t anything to write home about. I visited it once about ten years ago and, while it was one to tick off the list, it wasn’t a place I would go out of my way to use as a pub. Plenty of pubs close, and this was just another one to add to the total. If the new owners had simply left it to rot for a year, it would have faded from the public eye. But instead they have jumped the gun and left themselves open to prosecution.

As shown by the map extract above, the Crooked House is located at the end of a dead-end track in an unprepossessing area of disused mine workings, some of which have now been converted to a landfill site. Realistically, it’s somewhere that the vast majority of its customers will need to drive to. Over the years, pubgoers in general have become much less inclined to drive out to “character” pubs of this kind, and this will have made it less viable as a business. A similar process happened to the Royal Oak (th’Heights) in the hills above Oldham, which closed just before Covid and later received planning permission to be converted to a private house.

“After running the public house for almost three decades it has become increasingly difficult to continue running the business due to its remote location. Most customers travelled by car and as such their stay was only short due to drink driving laws. It attracted occasional walkers and people who live in and around Heights.”

Realistically, these are not good times for pubs located at the end of rural dead-ends.

Marston’s have rightly attracted opprobrium for selling the pub to the company with which they were already in dispute over access rights to the neighbouring landfill site. They can have been under no illusions about its likely fate. Possibly some other more enterprising owner might have been able to make a success of it as a pub, but realistically if there hadn’t been a pub there already it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to build one.

In the past, many family breweries may have kept on one or two pubs for sentimental reasons, being the first pub they ever bought or one that looked good on the company calendar. But nowadays a more hard-headed attitude tends to prevail, and every pub in a tied estate will be expected to earn its keep. In recent years, my local brewers Robinson’s have disposed of quite a few pubs that once might have been regarded as jewels in the company crown, such as the Cat & Fiddle in Cheshire and the Bull i’th’Thorn at Hurdlow in Derbyshire.

Pub closures are commonplace, and generally go through without anyone batting an eyelid apart from a few in the immediate vicinity. Only this week, the Manchester Evening News reports on 13 in the area that have closed permanently this year and 38 more that are long-term closed. Many once familiar landmarks such as the Saltersgate Inn on the North York Moors have gone. But people seem to have projected all their feelings about the closure of pubs on to this one particular case.

Over the past forty years, the pub trade as a whole has been in a long-term decline that has led to tens of thousands closing down. The reasons for this are down to a variety of changes in social trends and attitudes, although certain government actions such as the Beer Orders and the smoking ban have exacerbated matters. There is undoubtedly a profound sense of loss about this, even from people who never used pubs much, which is very perceptively explained in this article by Rowan Pelling from 2014.

At times this can turn into a kind of vaguely-directed anger, as we are seeing here, and people are keen to look for scapegoats such as pubcos, developers, supermarkets and government. But the reality is that pubs have mainly been undone by social change, not by some malign conspiracy, and there is no remotely credible alternative course of action that would have made it permanently 1978.

The suggestion has been made that the Crooked House should be rebuilt as an exact replica, as happened with the Carlton Tavern in London. However, the Carlton Tavern is in a well-populated urban area, whereas rebuilding the Crooked House would in effect be creating an expensive white elephant. If it was to be rebuilt at all it would be better located in the Black Country Living Museum at Dudley. And you have to wonder how many of the people bewailing its fate will make the effort to go out and visit a wet-led rural pub this weekend.