The Pub Curmudgeon

For three successive years I have run a poll asking the same question about people’s view of the smoking ban in pubs and bars. Last year’s r...

Last Friday the local branch of CAMRA did a pub crawl of the affluent South Manchester suburb of Didsbury. Given its “yuppie” character I th...

Last year I did a road test of some of the various pub review sites that are around on the Internet. The conclusion was that, while all of ...

There can’t be anything about which so much has been written in the beer blogosphere as “craft keg”, and yet which has made so little impact...

An argument I’ve often seen advanced, especially in relation to Stockport, is that new residential developments in close proximity to town c...

Being recently in the area, I thought I would pay a visit to Buckfast Abbey in Devon, home of the notorious Buckfast Tonic Wine . The abbey...

Shown on the right is a sign recently spotted in the window of the Admiral Boscarn pub in Looe, Cornwall. Despite the absence of Sky Sports,...

In response to my recent post about the problem of not knowing exactly when pubs stopped serving, one commenter writes: I think they shoul...

The Morning Advertiser reports that Newcastle City Council has introduced a 50p minimum unit price condition for all new licences and appl...

I recently wrote about the third anniversary of my Closed Pubs blog and made the comment that “it’s all kinds of pubs – estate pubs, suburb...

The 2003 Licensing Act gave pubs a welcome flexibility as to when they stopped serving at the end of the evening. However, it has led to a l...

Yesterday’s comments by the editor of the Good Pub Guide that Britain still had far too many “bad pubs” that were stuck in the 1980s and...

A point I’ve made before is that pubs can’t – and aren’t – seen in the same way as other businesses, because they are places in which people...

Three years ago I wrote about the new wave of super-premium ales that were appearing on the supermarket shelves. Since then, they have s...

This recently-spotted sign must really be one of the worst examples of officious pub nonsense I have ever encountered. In the past, you woul...