A journey into Middle England – Part 1

Atherstone is a market town in North Warwickshire with a population of about 11,000, located between Coventry and Burton-on-Trent, very close to the geographical centre of England. The only time it will enter into most people’s consciousness is when they speed through it at 100 mph on an express train between the North-West and London Euston, and may just notice the station sign. Some may have driven past it on the A5, but it was bypassed as early as 1955, so few will have actually ventured into the town itself.

So why choose it for a pub trip? Well, it’s easily accessible by train from Stockport, and indeed many other parts of the country, it’s always interesting to visit a town that I have never even set foot in before, and it has a collection of unselfconscious, unspoilt-by-progress pubs that ended up providing a very enjoyable day out.

The train journey from Stockport takes about an hour and a half, changing at Stafford, and today everything ran to time on a beautiful sunny Autumn day. Approaching Atherstone, you see the slightly sinister-looking landmark tower of the Victorian mansion Merevale Hall, situated on a spur of the hills southwest of the town.

Our meeting place and first stop was the King’s Head, located round the back of the station on a stub of the former A5, accessed by a remarkably low bridge under the mainline railway with a headroom of only 6’3”, which might trouble some taller humans. This is a chalet-style 20th century pub now mainly concentrating on food, but with a pleasant interior and plenty of comfortable seating. The sole cask beer was Taylor’s Landlord, which was in pretty good nick.

From here, there was a very pleasant ten-minute walk up five locks of the Coventry Canal, offering a surprisingly bucolic location given how close it is to the town centre. Our next pub stop was the Maid of the Mill, located next to a derelict factory building situated by the canal bridge. Outwardly, it has an unassuming two-bay frontage, but inside is surprisingly spacious, with two areas of comfortable seating on either side of the central door, and a section with a pool table extending to the rear. Cask ales were Bass, Old Speckled Hen and Abbot Ale. Most of us plumped for the Bass, which was good, although not quite scaling the heights. The pub had a sign instructing customers not to bring in products from the nearby chip shop. We met an 86-year-old regular enjoying his pint of Bass with whisky chaser whom a couple of the party had encountered on previous visits.

Heading north, we returned to Long Street, the former course of the A5, which runs ruler-straight through the centre of the town. The heavy traffic must have been a great annoyance to the townspeople before the bypass was constructed. A short walk east brought us to the White Horse, our scheduled lunch stop. This has a fairly unassuming frontage, but in fact goes a long way back, with a conventional pub-type area at the front and an extended dining section at the rear. Cask beers were Bass, Butty Bach and Oakham Citra. Again most chose the Bass, which was good but not outstanding (probably NBSS 3 on the CAMRA scoring system).

There is an extensive and varied menu of pub food, and it is one of the few places in the town catering for diners. However, it has to be said that the service was distinctly slow, taking around half an hour between placing orders and the dishes actually appearing. I ordered a lamb kofta on flatbread, where I was told they would have to substitute naan bread, which turned out to be overcooked and rock-hard. Those who opted for fish and chips or fishcakes seemed to be better served.

The delays with the food meant we were maybe half an hour behind schedule as we moved on the next pub, the Old Swan, the furthest east along Long Street we would go today. This is a striking 16th-century half-timbered building, probably the oldest pub in town, with an unspoilt interior that merits a two-star entry on CAMRA’s National Inventory (photo from the CAMRA website). Apparently it was remodelled in 1962, but scarcely changed since then, comprising a long front bar, a small separate snug to the right and a cosy lounge at the rear with extensive bench seating.

We found a congenial spot in the lounge. It’s a Marston’s tied house, and the cask ales available were Pedigree and Banks’s (Amber) Bitter. The barmaid warned that Pedigree was about at the end of the barrel, and so it proved, although it was willingly changed for Banks’s. Now brewed at Burton and reduced to 3.4% ABV this, while pleasant enough, is sadly now a shadow of its former self.

To be continued…

Settle down now

Over the years, I have often praised Wetherspoon’s business success in building an empire of large, thriving pubs from scratch in the face of an overall declining market. Earlier this year, I described how they had turned the existing business model of the industry on its head to be able to consistently deliver both food and drink at a much lower price point. I would largely agree with Cooking Lager’s comments about how the Wetherspoon’s App revolutionises the pub ordering process. And I will happily admit to using Spoon’s once or twice a month to take advantage of their food menu which, while not necessarily of gourmet quality, is unmatched by any competitors in its low prices and breadth of choice.

But please do not assume that this makes me a kind of uncritical fan of the company, as some people are. And, let me say it bluntly, in general I really don’t find Wetherspoon’s pubs congenial places to go for a drink.

Some years ago, I remember one member of the local CAMRA branch saying “I really don’t care what the pub’s like, so long as the beer is good.” But I have to say my attitude is pretty much the opposite. Obviously I don’t actively want to drink poor beer, but my priority when choosing somewhere to drink is a congenial environment. Maybe it is something of an autistic spectrum thing, but I would say I am much more sensitive than most to the physical characteristics of pubs.

I’ve been drinking legally for forty-eight years, and during that time I must have tried thousands of different beers. That’s more than enough to have worked out what I like and what I don’t. While I am interested in tasting beers like the new Boddingtons that are likely to become a permanent part of the landscape, or seasonal brews from local family brewers, my enthusiasm for tasting beers that I have never heard of before and am never likely to encounter again is pretty much zero. If you discount the Spartan industrial chic taproom kind of establishment, you really don’t tend to find uncongenial pubs with good beer. Broadly speaking, nice beer is found in nice pubs.

The key thing that I’m looking for is a sense of cosiness and enclosure. I’m not sure which pub the photo above is of – I believe it’s somewhere in the Welsh Marches – but that’s my kind of pub interior. Anywhere with tables and chairs in the middle of the room well away from the walls is a bit too wide-open for me, and I certainly don’t feel at home sitting there.

The best form of pub seating is wall benches, and my favoured spot is one where there is natural light from a window and I have a view of the bar or the door of the room. If there is loose seating, it should be arranged with the tables parallel to the wall rather than at right angles so you are looking into the centre of the room. Round tables are better than rectangular ones, especially with loose seating. Long tables that seat more than two at each side are a very bad idea. High-level posing tables are a complete no-no. Piped music is tolerable so long as it’s not too loud, but TV sport with the sound up is seriously offputting. Music can play in the background, but any TV with sound demands attention.

Fortunately, two of my nearby pubs, the Nursery in Heaton Norris and the Griffin in Heaton Mersey, tick most of those boxes, but unfortunately both are cursed with intrusive TV sport. I’ve often praised the quiet, cosy, comfortable environment of Samuel Smith’s pubs. All of those I regularly visit offer cask beer, but even if they didn’t I’d still enjoy going there.

But, sadly Wetherspoon’s, despite their low prices and lack of piped music, offer none of this. The typical Spoons branch has wide open spaces filled with a variety of loose furniture and posing tables. The picture above of the Palladium in Llandudno perfectly illustrates this – an impressive interior filled with cheap, disposable furniture. I might go in there for a meal, but I wouldn’t remotely feel at home. I’ve described such places in the past as being like a works canteen in a cathedral.

Some Wetherspoon’s are exceptions to this rule. For example, looking at my local ones, the Gateway in Didsbury has a congenial rear room with bench seating along one side, and another couple of corners of bench seating. The Kingfisher in Poynton has a raised area along the front that is only two tables deep and offers an element of seclusion from the rest of the pub. Both also have abundant natural light. Both, though, are conversions from pre-existing pubs. In contrast, the Calvert’s Court in Stockport, a former furniture shop, is basically just one long rectangular box.

So, while Spoons are a successful business and offer temptingly low prices, for me they really aren’t remotely appealing places just to go for a drink.

Only bad pubs close

The Waggon & Horses, a large Greene King-owned dining pub located in Handforth, just south of the Stockport boundary, has recently closed its doors for the last time. It is reported that the site will be redeveloped as an Aldi supermarket. Originally owned by Greenalls, it was a large, rather plain-looking 1930s roadhouse-type pub that has for as long as I can remember operated with a food-led format. Indeed, despite having lived in the Stockport area for forty years, I have never been in it, and now I never will.

Some may say that this was no great loss, but every pub that closes is another chip off the edifice of the pub trade. Inevitably it drew a response from certain quarters of “well, only bad pubs close”. Possibly it might have lasted longer if it had been run in a different way, but would that have simply drawn trade from other pubs as opposed to increasing it in total? And this comment, which you often hear, is one of the most unhelpful and misleading things that can be said about the decline of pubs.

Since their heyday in the late 70s, not far short of half the pubs in Britain have closed. Beer sales in pubs have fallen by more than two-thirds. I have discussed at length on this blog the various reasons for this – a toxic combination of legislation, changes in social attitudes to alcohol, demographic shifts and changes in patterns of economic activity. It has been driven by a general decline in the demand for what pubs have to offer, and to construct a narrative that, if pubs had been run better or diffeently, most of this could have been avoided, completely bursts the bounds of credibility. Indeed, on average, pubs now are considerably better run than they were in 1975, when there was a substantial bottom end of really dreadful establishments.

At a micro level, it does have some relevance. Take a village with two pubs, but where the overall level of demand has fallen such that there is only now the demand for one. Almost by definition, the less appealing and less well run of the two, let us call it Pub B, will be the one that closes. But that doesn’t mean that the reason the village now only has one pub is that Pub B was a bad pub, just that it was not quite as good as Pub A. Over the years, many well-run pubs have closed for reasons totally beyond their control, such as urban redevelopment, closure of local businesses, demographic changes in their area, or new road construction leaving them on an isolated backwater.

You have to wonder why people are so keen to espouse this argument. Some, obviously, are just a bit dim and unable to see the wood for the trees. But others seem to latch on to it because they are unwilling to confront the wider socio-economic reasons for the decline of the pub trade, so it acts as a comfort blanket. You see some “beer communicators” pointing to niche businesses doing well in favourable locations and saying “see, they can do it, so why can’t others?” But somehow I don’t think becoming a trendy craft bar would have saved the Waggon & Horses.

As an aside, there is a similar conflation of the specific and the general in the oft-heard mantra that “bad roads don’t cause crashes, bad drivers do.” In a sense, this is true, as most crashes (apart from those caused by mechanical failure) result from driver error of some kind. But it is profoundly unhelpful and counter-productive in terms of improving road safety.

Since the early 1960s, the number of fatalities on Britain’s roads has fallen by more than 75%, even though the number of cars on the road has vastly increased. But very little of this is due to improvements in driving standards, which often, from observation, seem to be pretty poor. Rather it is the result of a combination of improved medical care, better primary and secondary safety of vehicles, MoT testing, stricter enforcement of dangerous behaviours and, significantly, improvements in the design and layout of roads.

A perfect example of this is motorway crash barriers. It may shock younger readers to learn that, in the early days of motorways in the 1960s, there were no central reservation crash barriers. And, unsurprisingly, there were a number of serious accidents caused by vehicles, usually heavy lorries, crossing over into the opposite carriageway.

So what was the best way of dealing with this problem? Public education campaigns? Imposing severe penalties on drivers responsible for crossover accidents? No, it was installing crash barriers, so the accidents could not happen in the first place. There was no improvement in driving standards, but safety was greatly enhanced. Bad roads may not per se cause crashes, but better roads certainly help prevent them.