Another turn of the screw

The past fourteen years of Tory-led governments have not been good ones for lifestyle freedom, and I have criticised their actions on many occasions. They topped it off with the appalling generational smoking ban. However, I have always felt that Labour, whatever their other merits *, would continue where the Tories left off and indeed step things up a gear. As I said on the day after the election:

Well, what is done is done. Expect a big ramping up of lifestyle restrictions and sin taxes in the coming years. For your own good, of course. And if you think the pub and brewing sectors won’t be affected, you’re in for a big disappointment.

— Pub Curmudgeon 🌸🍻 (@oldmudgie) July 5, 2024

On that day, Keir Starmer said that he would lead a government that would “tread more lightly on people’s lives.” That seemed highly unlikely at the time, and so it has proved. He has now expressed his support for proposals that would extend the current indoor smoking ban to pub gardens, restaurant terraces and other outdoor areas including areas outside hospitals and sports grounds.

The ostensible reason for this is to improve people’s health and “protect the NHS”. However, it is questionable to what extent it will actually deter people from smoking, and the idea that that environmental tobacco smoke in outdoor areas, where it is rapidly dispersed into the air, represents a meaningful health risk **, is ludicrous.

The real motivation is to further demonise smokers and undermine the pub trade. There can be no doubt that this will have a significant negative impact on pubs, particularly wet-led pubs. Currently pubs can accommodate smokers up to a point, even though they are forced to treat them as second-class citizens, but now they will be unable to indulge anywhere on the premises. Pubs will find it very galling that they have invested in smoking shelters and appealing outdoor areas to cater for smokers, only to find it flung back in their face.

Antismokers often make the point that smokers now represent under 10% of the adult population, so excluding them shouldn’t make much difference, and could indeed encourage non-smokers to use outdoor areas. However, by definition, prissy, health-obsessed people are unlikely to spend much time in pubs, and in reality smokers are significantly over-represented in the pubgoing population, even after the indoor ban. After the 2007 indoor ban the sudden influx of non-smokers to pubs was conspicuous by its absence.

There is also the factor of social connections. If one or two members of a group are no longer accepted in a pub, then it is likely that the others will follow suit. This was widely observed following the indoor ban. “It’s not really the same now that Bill doesn’t come any more”. And he’s even less likely to come if he can no longer pop outside for a fag.

The proposals refer to “pub gardens”, but will that be extended to include any property belonging to a pub? Will it be made illegal to smoke in a pub car park? And will it be illegal to smoke while sitting in your own car in a pub car park? In the case of a country pub, what if a farmer decides to allow people to smoke in his nextdoor field?

There is also the obvious implication that, if people can’t smoke in pub gardens, they will inevitably then move to the street outside the pub. It’s already very evident that, where urban pubs have no external smoking area, smoking customers cluster on the street around the door, which a certain category of people find annoying. Will there then be a demand to create “smoking exclusion areas” around pubs? Near me, Wetherspoon’s Gateway in East Didsbury occupies a site in the angle of two roads with outside drinking areas on both sides. Would the smokers just move across the boundary on to the public pavement?

This leads on to the issue of enforcement. The indoor smoking ban is largely self-enforcing, given that the responsibility rests on licensees to ensure that no smoking is allowed on their premises. But it will be much more difficult in outside areas, particularly if pubs have extensive beer gardens. A couple of staff busy serving on the bar can’t be expected to regularly do an outside patrol. And if someone is found smoking, all you can do is ask them to stub it out or move outside the boundary.

The proposals also extend to banning smoking on areas of public streets, such as outside hospitals and sports grounds. The question has to be asked how this will be enforced. It’s hard to see that this will be a police priority when people are routinely being stabbed. And if councils recruit officials to deal with it, wouldn’t there be a whole list of better things for them to do, in particularly clearing up litter? No doubt “Smoking Warden” will prove an attractive opportunity for the kind of people recruited a few years ago to act as “Covid Marshals” and scream at anyone not wearing a mask.

It’s also obvious that in many urban areas nowadays there is a pervasive smell of cannabis, which is illegal anywhere. If this law is not enforced, what are the chances of enforcing localised prohibitions against tobacco?

The Labour Party was founded to represent and speak up for the working class. But their modern incarnation seems to regard them with a mixture of incomprehension and contempt. This proposal demonstrates a total ignorance of working-class preferences and lifestyles. As stated in this article:

The second reason this ban will anger ordinary people is that it involves an awkward element of class. Few of the middle class now smoke: smoking is concentrated among those who do trade and manual jobs, the unemployed. Working-class people do not want to be patronised by middle-class MPs. Once, Labour MPs with direct links to working-class life would have been immediately aware of this. No longer. The Labour party, in Parliament and outside it, has for some time been a middle-class caucus.

Tory leadership contenders have been quick to express their opposition to this plan. But this comes across as opportunistic weasel words when they voted for the original 2007 smoking ban, for plain tobacco packaging, and for the generational smoking ban. Would they really reverse this when in office? It’s funny how they seem to rediscover a love of freedom when no longer in government. (It’s worth mentioning that both Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick voted against the generational ban).

Many policy proposals are floated in the media but end up not being actually implemented. This idea has attracted a lot of opposition, including some on the political Left, and there is no certainty that it will happen. But it is only the first in a series of lifestyle restriction measures that we are likely to see, which include:

• Greatly increased restrictions on so-called “unhealthy” food
• Minimum alcohol pricing in England
• Reducing the drink-drive limit in England and Wales

We shall see. But if they decide not to turn the screw, it will be from political expediency, not any concern for individual freedom. And as if on cue, between drafting this post and publishing it, they have threatened the drinks industry with minimum pricing.

* Do they have any other merits?
** For the avoidance of doubt, I do not accept that environmental tobacco smoke in indoor areas represents a significant health risk. Some people just don’t like it. But we are where we are.

Forward to the past

I recently saw an interesting report that young drinkers have started to rediscover the delights of traditional pubs. I have to say I see very little evidence of this happening from my own experience, but if it’s being reported there must be some truth in it, and it’s happening in London, which always plays to different rules from the rest of the country when it comes to pubs. And it’s not just pubs in old buildings, it’s what are often disparagingly referred to as “old man pubs”.

You know the place: crown glass windows, button-back banquettes, patterned carpets curling at the edges. A flyer boasting about the Premier League football coverage. Five pints on tap, three of them ales. No food, save for scampi fries, pork scratchings and something indeterminate pickled.

And this is presented as a reaction to the “industrial chic” brewery tap look:

McIntosh cites it as a reaction to the “millennial” aesthetic that took over bars and pubs in the 2010s. “[Those] stripped-back bars with exposed brickwork and industrial lighting. Very moodily lit but ultimately quite boring,” he says. “Where these pubs are a bit more maximal, they’re more interesting — you’re transported back to another time.”

One of the key motivations behind the rise of CAMRA was a rejection of the modernising, rationalising spirit of the 1960s in favour of a much greater emphasis on tradition and individuality. This was mirrored in other trends of the 1970s such as Small is Beautiful, The Good Life and the rising interest in railway and canal preservation.

It was certainly the case when I was a “young drinker” that many of us would make a conscious effort to seek out the less prominent pubs that were unspoilt, quirky and characterful. These pubs often had better and cheaper beer too. For example, we would travel out from university in Birmingham to the Black Country, where unknown beers from breweries such as Batham’s, Holdens and Simpkiss could be found. But it wasn’t just the beer, it was the pubs and their atmosphere too. I blogged about this back in 2009:

It was a journey of discovery – we would find grotty pubs, snooty pubs, dull but welcoming pubs, interesting but unwelcoming pubs, and plenty of pubs of genuine character that we would return to again and again. We knew we had to be respectful to the locals and regulars, so we moderated our behaviour accordingly. One pub in particular, hidden away up a rural cul-de-sac, with two tiny rooms, a quarry-tiled floor and beer straight from the cask, really sticks in the memory. It isn’t like that now, of course.

Back in those days, many people would specifically go to visit particular “character pubs” on the grounds that they were quaint and unspoilt. It was a key part of their appeal. In 1989, Nick and Charlie Hurt wrote a book called In Search of the Perfect Pub, in which they said of the extremely unspoilt Barley Mow at Church Ireton in Derbyshire that it:

“is often packed with young people from the nearby cities of Derby and Nottingham, where most of the pubs are now amusement arcades. They learn how to play dominoes, love the beer and the atmosphere, and revel in the quiet simplicity to be found here.”

I suspect this was significantly reduced by 1989 compared with ten years previously, and now it won’t happen at all.

The general climate began to change in the 1980s, with the growth of the “yuppie” culture and the brief rise of the “fun pub”. And this trend has continued in subsequent years, with the modern craft beer movement being characterised by modernity, innovation and iconoclasm. Tradition is very much left behind.

The kind of pub we are considering may variously be described as “old man pubs”, “traditional pubs”, “proper pubs” or whatever, and these categories, while overlapping, may be defined slightly differently. But, by and large, you know one when you see one. However, even if you want to go to an “old man pub”, they can be increasingly hard to find.

The past forty or so years have seen a steady attrition in their numbers. There has been a dramatic reduction in inner-urban areas, with the smaller pubs that have received less investment often being the first to go. This has spread to the fringes of town and city centres. In more rural areas, again many have closed, and those that remain have often been converted to a food-dominated formula where anyone who just wants a drink and a chat is made to feel out of place.

The simple fact of being located in a old building retaining much of its original layout and fittings does not necessarily mean that a pub qualifies. An “old man pub” can serve straightforward food, but if most of its customers are there to eat expensive, elaborate meals then it fails the test. The same is true if it has turned itself into a self-conscious beer exhibition with ten cask lines and six craft kegs. And, even if most of its customers are old men, no modern micropub is truly an “old man pub”. *

Another thorny issue is that of TV sport. Sport on pay-TV has revolutionised the pub scene over the past thirty years, and there are now relatively few wet-led pubs that don’t have it. To insist that no “old man pub” can have TV sport is greatly restricting the category. It’s more a question of how the sport is managed – whether it’s in every room, and whether the volume is turned off except for big events. It should still be possible to chew the fat over a few drinks. Holt’s brewery rather fall down on this, as they own many pubs that are very traditional in their general appearance and layout, but have an enormous screen in every room.

Of course there is one pub operator where the vast majority of their pubs fall into this category, when they are actually open, namely Samuel Smith’s. But their rigid policy of no mobile devices may deter younger customers, although I understand that it isn’t as strictly enforced in London as it is in the North.

As I said in the introduction, I have seen very little evidence personally of younger drinkers seeking out traditional pubs again. Some people on Twitter did suggest, though, that it was starting to happen in Liverpool and Manchester. The Peveril of the Peak in Manchester was given as an example, of a pub of highly traditional physical appearance that attracts customers of all ages. But I don’t think they’ve spread to the Hare & Hounds yet.

Many social trends turn full circle in the end, although it isn’t a given. There does seem to be a growing feeling that making everything automatic and digital has gone too far. I remember a few years back in the break between Christmas and New Year being heartened by the sight of a group of what I assumed were university students meeting up and enjoying a few drinks and a chat in a traditional multi-roomed pub in an urban fringe location. That’s the kind of thing that pubs should be about. But that particular pub has now become entirely dominated by dining, so that social meeting would not be possible any more.

* For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with other categories of pubs. But they’re not “old man pubs”.

Putting me out of a job?

X/Twitter have recently improved the functionality of their Grok AI application, in particular enhancing its ability to produce images. The image below is of a grumpy old man reading the newspaper in a pub. It may not look all that much like me, but it does catch the spirit.

On a more serious note, it will readily produce articles on various topics, and you can ask it to write them in the style of particular authors. So below is its attempt to write a piece on Why Painting Pubs Grey is a Bad Idea, in the style of the Pub Curmudgeon. This is reproduced verbatim.

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The Grey Menace: Why Painting Pubs Grey is a Misguided Trend

In the ever-evolving landscape of pub decor, a new trend has emerged that threatens to drain the very soul from our beloved establishments: painting them grey. Now, I've seen many a fashion come and go in the pub world, from the ghastly '80s neon to the pretentious '90s gastropub chic, but this grey wave might just be the most soulless yet.

The Aesthetic Argument

Firstly, let's talk aesthetics. Pubs are not just buildings; they're sanctuaries of character, history, and warmth. Grey, as a colour, does nothing but chill the atmosphere. It's the colour of a cloudy day, of office cubicles, of the mundane. When you step into a pub, you're not looking for the ambiance of a corporate meeting room or the sterile environment of a modern art gallery. You're seeking warmth, perhaps the glow of wood, the comfort of reds, greens, or even the occasional daring blue. Grey? It's the colour of indecision, of neutrality, and it does nothing to invite the soul to linger.

The Psychological Impact

Psychologically, grey is often associated with depression, boredom, and a lack of creativity. Now, imagine walking into your local for a pint, only to be greeted by walls that might as well be saying, "Feel as dull as I look." Pubs are where stories are told, where laughter should bounce off the walls, not be absorbed into them. Grey walls might as well be soundproofing against joy.

The Historical Disconnect

Pubs, especially in Britain, are steeped in history. They're not just places to drink; they're community hubs, historical landmarks, and repositories of local culture. Painting them grey is akin to stripping them of their heritage, their stories, and their personality. It's like putting a Victorian-era pub into a modern art gallery frame – it's out of place, out of time, and out of character.

The Practicality of Colour

From a practical standpoint, grey might seem like a safe choice, but it's anything but. Grey shows dirt more than you might think, and in a pub, where life happens, where spills and smudges are part of the charm, grey will soon look more like a dirty dishwater than a sophisticated choice. Moreover, if you're looking for a timeless look, grey might seem neutral now, but in a decade, it'll scream '2020s' just as loudly as any other trend.

The Economic Angle

Let's not forget the economic implications. Pubs are businesses, and atmosphere is part of the product. A grey pub might appeal to the fleeting trend of minimalism, but it won't hold the charm that brings in regulars. Regulars are the lifeblood of any pub, and if your local starts looking like every other grey-walled, soulless space, why would they return? The cost of repainting when the trend dies out? That's not just paint; that's lost character, lost customers, lost revenue.

Conclusion

So, to all pub landlords, designers, and anyone with a say in pub decor, think twice before you reach for that grey paint. You're not just choosing a colour; you're choosing the mood, the memory, and the very essence of what a pub should be. Let's keep our pubs vibrant, alive, and anything but grey. After all, in a world where everything seems to be turning grey, the pub should be the last bastion of colour, warmth, and life. Here's to keeping our pubs as colourful as the stories told within them. Cheers to that!

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It’s not quite there, but it’s not far off, and you could certainly take some of the points and phrases to use in your own piece. It isn’t going to put me out of a job, though. But it does reinforce the point that if you want to write convincing, authentic opinion pieces it helps if you refer to specific examples and personal experiences rather than just dealing in generalities. And rest assured I’m not going to start regurgitating a series of pieces written by Grok.

I’ve also been playing with the image generator on some pub-related topics. While it can produce some high-quality images on general themes, it can make some rather odd mistakes on specifics. For example, it seems to produce images of pubs without any kind of pub sign. The image below is “traditional English country pub”. An attractive building, redolent of Kent or Sussex, but with nothing whatsoever to indicate that it is a pub.

It also seems to have an odd tendency to place pub customers on the staff side of the bar between the counter and the bar back. Another quirk is that it always seems to show pub landlords and landladies wearing an apron or dungarees, which presumably is an American thing. The images below are of a jovial landlady and a grumpy landlord.

It needs to be remembered that what it is doing is producing a mashup of existing online images relating to the keywords you have specified; it isn’t working from first principles. But one thing it is good at is producing images of cats, possibly helped by the fact that about 50% of all images on the Internet are of cats. This is “attractive young cat lying on the bar of a pub.” All together now: “Awww!”

A historical poser

Last month, I wrote a review of Historical Building Mythbusting by James Wright. In this book, the author debunks most of the familiar claims for various establishments to be the oldest pub in England, the British Isles or wherever. But he also comes up with some genuine examples of pubs that have been extensively researched and found to be of great antiquity. Some of these, such as the George at Norton St Philip in Somerset and the New Inn in Gloucester, are fairly well-known, but one that slightly surprised me was what is now the Henry Tudor Inn in Shrewsbury.

I’ve visited Shrewsbury many times over the years, but I have never been in this place, and indeed I hardly knew of its existence. It has had a chequered history, but in recent years became the Lion Tap, associated with the next-door Lion Hotel. This was once one of Shrewsbury’s smartest hotels, but in more recently years was controversially used to house illegal migrants, and is now closed.

It has now been taken over by Market Drayton-based brewer and pubco Joule’s, who have carried out an extensive refurbishment and also extended the premises forwards to provide a frontage on the main street, Wyle Cop, which it previously lacked. While this wasn’t the sole purpose of my visit, on a recent trip to Shrewsbury I took the opportunity to take a look.

It’s a long, narrow, half-timbered building with overhanging upper storeys running along the left-hand side of a narrow alleyway off Wyle Cop. It’s obviously of considerable antiquity, although it was only possible to date it specifically to the early part of the 15th century through dendrochronology. Joule’s have a distinctive style of refurbishment, which can produce some very congenial interiors, although it can come across as a touch arch and self-conscious.

In this case, I’d assume that the interior has been much charged over the years and owed little to the 15th century, but they needed to work around and respect what historical features remained. Essentially it’s in two sections, with a “pub” part at the front, a central bar running athwart the property, and more of a restaurant area at the rear which opens out on the left. As is typical with Joule’s, there’s extensive use of wood panelling and flooring.

However, immediately on walking into the pub, I was struck by how all the seating in the front part, which extends the original pub forward to the street, was comprised of the dreaded posing tables. I have written about these before, on how they are divisive and offputting to the elderly and disabled. They may have a place in trendy bars, but certainly not in what aspires to be a traditional historic pub. Joule’s deserve praise for their work in conserving this unique historic building, but the posing tables are seriousky out of character. I did manage to find a more comfortable berth on the only row of normal-height bench seating, but the general impression was of a pub interior where I did not want to linger.

Fortunately, salvation was near at hand. A short walk down Wyle Cop and across the Severn via the Greyfriars footbridge brought me to the splendid Cross Foxes on Longden Coleham, which is a must-visit every time I go to Shrewsbury. This is a traditional wet-led proper pub with wood panelling, bench seating and carpet, offering Draught Bass, Three Tuns XXX and Wye Valley HPA and Butty Bach. It was pretty busy in mid-afternoon, with plenty of banter flowing from a mainly more mature clientele. It may not be as historically authentic as the Henry Tudor, but I’d much prefer to spend an hour or two there.

On my way back to the station, I called in to the Three Fishes, an old pub on a narrow cobbled street which has a sign on the wall proclaiming that it was “The original smoke-free public house”. I’m not sure that’s really anything to be proud of. Ironically, in the pub I overheard a customer saying that the smoking ban had been one of the main reasons for the decline of the pub trade.