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.