European whine lake

There have been suggestions that this week’s cut in beer duty may be judged illegal under European law, as it supposedly discriminates against wine in relation to beer, but I have to say I’m not entirely convinced. The 27 countries of the European Union have widely differing duty regimes on different types of alcoholic drinks, both in absolute terms and relative between categories. 15 of the 27 countries – all, obviously, wine producers – levy no duty whatsoever on table wine, while wine duty in France is negligible.

France recently imposed a swingeing hike in duty on beer (which is mostly imported) while leaving that on wine (which is mostly home-produced) untouched. In the past, there have been several occasions when the British Chancellor has frozen spirits duty while raising beer duty, and in 2010 Alastair Darling imposed a 10% increase in cider duty which was subsequently cancelled after the General Election.

Given the huge disparities in duty rates that currently exist between countries, and the many precedents for altering the relative duty rates between different categories, I can’t really see that this suggestion has a leg to stand on. Also, as I pointed out here, prior to the Budget the level of duty paid per unit of alcohol on wine and beer was pretty much identical, so it’s hard to see how there was any discrimination in the tax system.

Doing your duty

Well, George Osborne today became the first Chancellor of the Exchequer to actually cut beer duty since Derick Heathcoat-Amory (pictured) in 1959. In a surprise move, he went well beyond what had been asked for by the campaign to scrap the escalator, and cut the main rate of beer duty by 2%, which supposedly will reduce the price of a pint at the bar by a penny.

This must be regarded as a major success for the campaign, which managed to put across a wider message about the role of pubs and the brewing industry in British society. However, given that the escalator remains for all other categories of alcoholic drinks, it is something of a triumph of special pleading. To some degree, it is a rebalancing exercise, as during the 1990s and 2000s there was more than one occasion when Ken Clarke and Gordon Brown froze spirits duty while continuing to increase that for beer. But it’s not going to do anything to stop the growing problems of alcohol smuggling and illegal distilling. Whisky and cider are substantial British industries as well as brewing, and they are going to be feeling somewhat badly done to today.

Osborne’s changes have also ended the strict proportionality of the different rates of beer duty that existed before, as the escalator has continued to be applied to the 25% addition for High Strength Beer Duty, and the duty on beers of 2.8% or under has been cut by 6%, not just 2%, so it is now less than half the standard duty. I can’t see that doing much to increase their appeal, as we’ve seen already that a tax break alone cannot create a demand for something for which there wasn’t one before.

It’s a relief, though, that the fears of many including myself that additional duties would be introduced on higher-strength beers and ciders have not been realised.

It’s also important not to see this as any kind of magic bullet for the pub trade. The anti-escalator campaign was at times guilty of overstating the negative impact of the escalator, when in reality there have been many other factors leading to a reduction of trade over the period it has been in force, not least of course the smoking ban. Five years of the escalator will have increased the price of a pint at the bar by maybe 10p. Of course that hasn’t helped, but it alone can’t really have been a make-or-break factor for many pubs.

So, while it might act to somewhat slow the rate of decline, it would be wrong to expect this to be the start of a turnaround as the 1959 cut proved to be.

And I’m awaiting the predictable howls of rage from the anti-drink lobby.

Bottling success

It’s the centrepiece of the supermarket beer display – an array of over 100 different bottles, reflecting distinctive local identities from across the UK, glistening in black, gold, red, blue and green. But it’s something about which Britain’s leading beer consumer group remains distinctly sniffy and equivocal. Yes, it’s the premium bottled ales section, arguably the greatest success of the British brewing industry in recent years.

I’m old enough to remember when, if you wanted beer to drink at home, the choice was very limited, and the vast majority was in cans – Stones Bitter, McEwan’s Export, LongLife (the beer “specially brewed for the can”). But, over time, things changed. There was a steady move from pub to at-home drinking, and brewers began introducing bottled (but brewery-conditioned) versions of the popular real ales people enjoyed in the pub.

By the mid-90s this had become a distinct sector in its own right, but it was still often relegated to a small section of the display that was outshadowed by the mass-market canned bitters and lagers. It’s only really in the past fifteen or so years that PBAs have taken centre-stage in the supermarket beer offering. The choice has also greatly increased, with many more of the established family brewers beginning to take the category seriously (including the four Greater Manchester ones) and a growing number of new and micro-breweries climbing on board.

This report from Marston’s shows the category recording 11% volume growth in 2012, especially impressive when you consider that overall beer volumes fell by 5%. It’s the biggest success story in beer. Yet, as the vast majority of the offerings are not bottle-conditioned, it is not something that CAMRA can embrace unreservedly, if at all.

Of course a major reason for this growth is the continuing shift from pub to at-home drinking, but it is clear that PBAs appeal to a similar demographic to that which drinks cask beers in the pub, and indeed customers tend to see the two as equivalent. I’ve more than once heard PBAs referred to as “real ales”, even though by the strict definition they are not, and this is something borne out by this comment on the Refreshing Beer blog: “I'm frequently informed about the 'real ales' my work colleagues will be enjoying at the weekend, when what they actually mean is a range of bottled ales from Morrisons etc. none of which are real.”

It is clear what people mean, though – while these beers may not be bottle-conditioned, they still convey a strong sense of being authentic, traditional, distinctive, with a well-defined sense of place, maybe even a “craft” product. Something a cut above the mass-market lagers and smooth bitters. Over time, the meaning of words changes according to how people actually use them, and it may well be that eventually PBAs are generally regarded as “real ales” because that’s what people call them.

And, if you think brewers are accepting low margins for this kind of business, bear in mind that the undiscounted price of most PBAs in Tesco (£1.99 for 500ml, or £2.26 a pint) is now actually more than the £2.09 a pint charged in Spoons. Getting a long-run order from a supermarket will give much more reliable business than chasing after pubcos and free houses, so it’s a good market for ambitious new breweries to get into.

Mainstream to niche

One of the most noticeable developments on the pub scene over the last couple of decades has been the growth of the “specialist beer pub”, which has now become the favoured drinking haunt of the two overlapping (but not identical) groups of CAMRA members and beer enthusiasts.

But Cookie raises an interesting point on Tandleman’s blog as to what CAMRA members did before the multi-beer pub was invented, and indeed nails this type of pub pretty accurately:

Before CAMRA there were pubs. Some were posh and some were dumps. I gather you knew what to expect a short while after entering.

At what point did the "CAMRA pub" become a recognised type of pub? You know lots of hand pumps, Vedett beer signs, Paulaner coasters, Middle class berghaus fleece wearing public sector employee bearded punters. It could not of been early doors in the 70's. Was it an 80's or 90's thing? When CAMRA types decided to shun the pubs of regular folk and sit in their own inauthentic but safe beer enthusiast theme pubs?

In my recollection, the CAMRA members then just tended to drink in the “normal” pubs, although they favoured certain pubs over others on the grounds of:

(a) Owned by “favoured” breweries, i.e. Holts rather than Greenalls
(b) Reputation for keeping their beer well, and
(c) Generally “traditional” atmosphere

So let’s go back to 1983 and see what featured in the Good Beer Guide for Stockport – a time when I had never set foot in any pub in the town:

• Arden Arms (Robinson’s) – still open, in 2013 GBG
• Armoury (Robinson’s) – still open, in 2013 GBG
• Blossoms (Robinson’s) – still open, now an “Ale Shrine”
• Castlewood (Wilson’s) – long since closed
• Crown (Boddington’s) – still open, in 2013 GBG as a multi-beer freehouse
• George (Higson’s) – reopened 2012 after a period of closure
• Old King (Bass) – recently demolished after being closed for a few years
• Swan with Two Necks (Robinson’s) - still open, in 2013 GBG

The Royal Oak on High Street (in its original form) is offered as a “try also”.

Between them, those nine pubs are listed as offering twelve different beers – Bass XXXX Mild, Cask Bitter and Draught Bass, Boddington’s Best Mild and Bitter, Higson’s Mild and Bitter, Robinson’s Best Mild, Best Bitter and Old Tom, and Wilson’s Mild and Bitter. You could probably now find more different beers on the bar of the Crown, Magnet or Railway, although fewer milds. From the perspective of 2013, it’s an eye-opener that a pub such as the Old King, with Bass XXXX Mild and Cask Bitter (the successor to Brew Ten) on electric pumps, could even be considered for the GBG, but so it was.

Obviously now there is hugely more choice overall, but the enthusiasts tend to confine themselves fairly strictly to the likes of the aforementioned Crown, Magnet and Railway. Whereas before an evening out would consist of sampling various beers in a selection of pubs, now it tends to be more a case of drinking your way along the bar. I can’t help feeling that something has been lost, with the middle-class beer enthusiasts retreating into the niche of the specialist pub and no longer engaging with the generality of the pub trade.

Pedigree yo-yo

Four years ago, I reported how Marston’s had increased the strength of bottled Pedigree (but not draught or canned) from 4.5% ABV to 5.0%, presumably so it could compete on level terms with “heavy-hitters” of the premium bottled ale market such as Tanglefoot and Abbot Ale. However, I recently noticed that they have stealthily brought it back down again to 4.5%. I don’t remember seeing any announcement about this, so I’m not sure how long it’s been the case. I think the photo, from the Marston’s website, still shows it as 5.0% on the neck label.

To be honest, the 5.0% version always seemed a touch unbalanced, with a noticeable alcohol character you don’t generally find in beers of that strength, and it’s a better all-round beer at 4.5%. There are still plenty of stronger beers in the Marston’s portfolio such as Old Empire, Hobgoblin and Ringwood Fortyniner. But is this another sign that 4.5% is becoming a kind of de facto maximum strength above which brewers are increasingly reluctant to venture for mainstream products?

Motorway Spoons area

Tim Martin’s latest bright idea is wanting to open branches of Wetherspoon’s at motorway service areas. Now, there’s an obvious problem with that, as MSAs are not allowed to serve alcohol for consumption on the premises, and there’s no sign of that policy changing. However, setting that aside, you could well see it working. Wetherspoons already have successful branches in airports and railway stations, and anywhere there’s a lot of pre-existing customer footfall is likely to be attractive to them. And, if a non-alcoholic Spoons could be made to work, it would result in a substantial improvement in the quality and value of food available, which is often pretty dire.

It must be said, though, that for good reason Spoons have tended to fight shy of venturing into sites alongside major trunk roads, where the motorway alcohol restriction doesn’t apply. They want locations where there are already plenty of potential customers on site, not ones that most people have to specifically drive to.

Other pub operators have not taken the same view, and indeed Greene King and Marston’s have specifically targeted newbuild sites situated by major road junctions and on retail and leisure parks. And the recently developed Derby and Burton service area, situated where the A38 and A50 cross near the Toyota factory, includes a family dining pub, the Cherry Tree Farm, built by the Cloverleaf Pub Company, which was taken over by Greene King in 2011. The opportunities are there if Tim wants to take them – but those pubs are not really in line with the Wetherspoon business model. Maybe he could have tried to revive the now-demolished Bullington Cross pub at the busy crossroads of the A34 and A303 in Hampshire.

Endlessly repeating revolution

In pretty much every decade of my drinking career, people have claimed that the previous decade has seen a “pub food revolution” resulting in a dramatic improvement in the availability and quality of food served in pubs. However, my memory is that, even in the late 70s, a large number of pubs did serve food and indeed very often were more inclined to experiment than they are now. If there had been a revolution when pubs really took the concept of food on board, it was probably in the period between 1965 and 1975. Even this may be wrong though, as this post by Boak and Bailey suggests that even in the early 50s pubs were regarded as a good bet for a hearty, filling meal.

Thirty years ago there was certainly much less food in pubs in the evenings, and in some parts of the country it could be hard to find food on Sundays. This was especially true of town centres, which before the introduction of Sunday trading were often pretty dead. Undoubtedly a higher proportion of pubs didn’t serve food at all, but most of those were the kind of local pubs that in many cases now have either closed or stopped opening at lunchtimes during the week. I have even eaten quite fancy full meals in pubs that have since gone evenings-only and stopped their food service.

On the other hand, most of the pubs aiming to attract a wider clientele than just locals did serve lunchtime food, and often did very good business from it. I would even venture to say that, in 1978, there was in total more lunchtime food served in pubs than there is now, a big factor behind this being that office workers were much more likely to go out to the pub for “a pie and a pint”. I remember my father often discussing the various pubs in the locality that he and his colleagues had visited for lunch, and certainly during the early years of my working career up to maybe the late 80s this was commonplace too. People weren’t getting drunk or anything remotely like it, but it probably did lead to a dip in productivity in the early afternoon that might not be considered acceptable nowadays.

There were also a lot more restaurants of the Berni Inn type which catered for a lot of the trade, particularly in the evenings and on Sunday lunchtimes, that now goes to dining pubs. Pretty much every major pub-owning brewery seemed to have its own steakhouse chain – anyone remember Boddingtons’ Henry’s Table? Hotel restaurants also had a higher profile amongst non-residents than they do now.

Times change and the pattern of trade alters over the years. But within the drinking memory of anyone of working age today, there was never a time when, as often alleged, it was hard to find anything to eat in pubs beyond crisps and pickled eggs.

Boom and bust

The February issue of the CAMRA newspaper What’s Brewing included an opinion piece by barley merchant Robin Appel in which he argued that “if you want quality beer, you’ve got to be prepared to pay”, and said that drinkers should stop complaining about the high price of beer, something which drew a predictably angry reaction.

The article also included this highly inaccurate paragraph about trends in UK alcohol consumption:

Serious correction to the UK beer (and malt) consumption began in the second half of the 20th century with the demise of our heavy industry, before which workers regularly sank eight pints per night. This falling beer consumption was further helped along by the introduction of the breathalyser in 1967.

This was corrected in the letters column of the March edition by one Peter Edwardson of Stockport (cough), who wrote:

Robin Appel (WB Feb) is wrong to say there was a serious correction in UK beer consumption in the second half of the 20th century. In fact, the 1960s and 70s saw a boom. Large numbers of new pubs were opened in new housing developments, often much larger than the inner-city pubs they replaced, and existing pubs were extended and refurbished.

After a drop in the early 1980s resulting from the recession and the rundown of heavy industries, beer consumption held up well into the 1990s. It is only in the past 10 or 15 years that a perfect storm of factors has led to the decline we are currently experiencing. Having said that, the UK is still producing and drinking more beer overall than at any time during the 1950s.

However, I am given to understand that the sense of the letter would have been much improved if the original second sentence had been retained:

In fact, the Sixties and Seventies saw a remarkable boom in beer drinking, with UK beer production increasing by 73% between 1959 and 1979. The introduction of the breathalyser in 1967 scarcely caused a blip in the upward trend.

The great 1960s and 1970s beer and pub boom tends to be airbrushed out of history as it does not fit in with the “CAMRA narrative” of what was happening to the industry during that period.

The letters page also includes letters from John Ogdon of Scarborough and Peter Judge of Brighouse urging CAMRA not to give up on the fight against fizzy beer. Obviously “old CAMRA” is alive and well in Yorkshire!

Dead in the water (again)

The Daily Mail reports today that Cameron’s minimum pricing plans are now effectively dead in the water following a Cabinet revolt.

One minister said such a rise would be ‘inconceivable’ when cost of living is expected to be an issue at the next election. The minister added: ‘It would be political suicide and it will have to be abandoned.’

Funny that, exactly the same was reported back in December. The plan was never going to get off the ground anyway because it is almost certainly illegal under European competition law, so this is just more softening up prior to the inevitable climbdown.

But it doesn’t look too good for abandoning the duty escalator, as scrapping both policies in the same month would really have the anti-drink lobby foaming at the mouth. And there must be a strong chance that some further nasty on alcohol duties will be sneaked into the Budget, such as raising the rate of High Strength Beer Duty or extending its scope.

Cart before horse

It has often been said that the role of CAMRA is “to campaign for real ale” and that seems a clear enough mission statement. However, something that isn’t appreciated as widely as it should be is that CAMRA actually predates “real ale” as a concept. It’s not as though the organisation was formed to defend something that was widely understood but felt to be under threat.

When they had their famous discussion in that pub in the west of Ireland, the four founder members had a general sense that something was going wrong with British beer, but they didn’t know exactly what. Initially, of course, the organisation was called the Campaign for the Revitalisation of Ale. It was only later, once they had looked into the subject more thoroughly, that the current definition of “real ale” was arrived at.

In the context of the British draught beer market at the time, it was actually a pretty good approximation of the distinction between “good” and “bad”, and it is something that has stood the test of time. Of course recently it has been challenged to some extent by the rise of “craft keg”, but that remains very much a niche phenomenon and this certainly isn’t meant as yet another blogpost on that much overdone topic.

The problem starts to arise when the principle is extended to areas of the beer market for which it was never intended. By the time CAMRA was founded, cask-conditioning had pretty much died out beyond the shores of Great Britain, but that isn’t to say there was no good draught beer in any other countries. Yet you would find some people who had taken the definition a bit too seriously saying things like “there’s no good beer in Germany, it’s all keg”, which was both silly and ignorant. To some extent, you still do.

Matters got worse, though, and were brought closer to home, when the principle was extended from draught to packaged beers in the UK. In 1971, bottled and canned beers accounted for less than 10% of the British beer market, and so had not assumed the significance they have now, and effectively all bottled beers had been “bright” for decades as drinkers wanted to avoid the risk of cloudy beer. There were only a tiny handful of bottle-conditioned beers still on the market, and so CAMRA could easily put these on a pedestal without ruffling too many feathers. The discerning drinker drank real ale in the pub.

However, over time the market changed. There was a steady move from pub to at-home drinking, and brewers began introducing bottled (but brewery-conditioned) versions of the popular real ales people enjoyed in the pub, rather than the generic pale and brown ales that had once dominated the market. Clearly a bottle of Taylor’s Landlord is a very different product from a can of Younger’s Tartan, and yet it was still glibly dismissed as “keg in a bottle”.

In response to this, CAMRA began putting more effort into championing bottle-conditioned beers, and developed the marketing concept of “real ale in a bottle”. White Shield has been repackaged and promoted, and some of the established brewers have introduced new beers like Fuller’s 1845 and Young’s Special London Ale. However, it can’t be said that the sector has exactly set the market alight, and most of the widely available BCAs are strong specials that you would only drink on occasion rather than everyday quaffing brews.

And the downside is that many micro-breweries have been encouraged to produce ranges of bottle-conditioned beers that, to be blunt, are wildly inconsistent dreck, and which many buyers will actively avoid. Those smaller breweries wanting to make a mark in the bottled market have – to the chagrin of some CAMRA diehards – gone for brewery-conditioning, as they know it is more customer-friendly. Take, for example, Purity, Slater’s, Moorhouse’s, Hawkshead, Harviestoun and Williams Bros, all of which have been spotted on the shelves of my local supermarkets.

It has to be recognised that bottle-conditioning simply does not give the drinker the clear distinction from brewery-conditioning that cask beer does over keg. Indeed, the main difference was always the care needed in pouring to keep the sediment in the bottle, and the likelihood of getting a cloudy glassful, although that has been eroded by the widespread adoption of “sticky” yeast by the bigger brewers. But, given that, it cannot be said that a bottle of bottle-conditioned Fuller’s Bengal Lancer presents the drinker with a significantly different experience in terms of general character and mouthfeel from one of brewery-conditioned ESB.

As py0, who sometimes comments on here, said on the CAMRA forum, you can take some CAMRA diehard into Tesco, show him the hundred or more widely varied British ales on the shelves, mostly from independent and micro breweries, and ask him which he thinks are worth drinking. He’ll cough, hum and hah a bit and point out the one or two that are bottle-conditioned such as 1845 or White Shield. Surely that can’t be an acceptable position for an organisation supposedly committed to promoting quality and variety in British beer and brewing.

Of course the vast majority of drinkers, even the most knowledgeable and discerning, cheerfully ignore this distinction, and its effect is not so much to restrict the prospects of individual breweries as to make CAMRA appear pedantic and out-of-touch. It does it no favours to erect bottle-conditioning as a shibboleth for packaged beers. Whether or not a beer is good should be judged by how it actually tastes, not on whether some particular hard-and-fast rule has been rigidly applied.

Premium position

Following the most recent round of brewery price increases, I paid £3.20 for a pint of Robinson’s Dizzy Blonde (3.8% ABV) in a pub within the boundaries of Stockport MBC. This compared with a previous price of £3.05, and so represented an increase of nearly 5% - and that’s before the next round of the duty escalator. There’s at least one pub I can think of within the borough boundaries where it would probably be at least 10p dearer, while on the other hand you could get the same beer, or the slightly stronger Unicorn, for £2.60, only a few miles away in and around the town centre.

On the face of it, such differentials may seem hard to justify when the underlying cost of the beer is identical. However, it must be remembered that these pubs are tenancies, not managed houses, and licensees are entitled to make their own judgment as to the appropriate level of pricing for their local area. Pub company owned pubs in the Stockport suburbs are already charging similar prices, and out in the leafier parts of Cheshire the typical price of a pint is well north of £3. Those with an interest in economics may also want to consider the concept of embedded rent, which is especially relevant to products such as pub drinks which are consumed at the time and place of purchase and not stored.

While it is undoubtedly true that differentials between pubs owned by the same brewery have widened over the years, it has always been the case that some pubs, often those serving a more prosperous clientele, have charged a price premium. And you can now see similar differentials in the Holts estate, once renowned for uniform low prices, between their “improved” pubs and their more traditional boozers.

A further factor is that customers of pubs in more salubrious areas will not only have more money in their pockets, but are also more likely to be diners and so will view the cost of their pint as part of their overall spend. A 50p differential on one or two pints will be neither here nor there if you’re spending £15 or more on a two-course meal, but if you’re going to the pub for a six-pint session you will be much more price-conscious.

The question must be asked, though, as to whether the trade as a whole is taking decisions which from the short-term perspective of the individual pub may seem to make sense, but in the long-term are likely to seriously erode business by continually raising prices above the general level of inflation, let alone their customers’ disposable income.

Wet January

Well, not a lot of interest from blog readers in “Dry January”, with no less than 46% having visited pubs ten or more times just to have a drink, and two-thirds having done it at least five times. Amongst this sample, pubgoing is clearly alive and well. However, as seen with other polls on here, there’s a distinct U-shape to the results, with 28% having done it just once or twice or not at all - although they may well have had a drink elsewhere.

As I said in a recent post, people who want to go to pubs will continue to go to pubs. Whether the population as a whole will do the same is less certain.

Sticky wickets

There’s an interesting new website called A Journey into History which contains reminiscences of the long-closed Railway Inn on Wellington Road South in Stockport, which is now an art shop.

One of the most memorable anecdotes is the tale of pub regular “Sticky” Edwards whom the family encountered when they moved to another pub, the Church in Heaton Norris. At the same time both funny and sad, this has to be read to be believed, and conjures up a vanished world of how pubs used to be.

You just don’t seem to see that kind of heroic-cum-tragic volume consumption of beer in pubs nowadays. Indeed, to maintain a twenty pints a day habit would be prohibitively expensive, yet “Sticky” seemed to manage it on a pension in the 1950s, suggesting that the real-terms price of a pint across the bar has actually increased over the years.

The story reminded me of this post from last year about a retired licensee who claimed to have routinely drunk forty pints a day in his heyday.

A more selective appeal

Tandleman recently wrote a post about the future of the pub entitled I’ll Still Have a Pub to Go To. This included the following comments about the current situation that could almost have been written by myself:

So why go to the pub? Remaining bottom end pubs are no go areas, road house pubs have either gone or become family oriented eateries, estate pubs have closed, slowly, one after the other as drinkers can drink and smoke cheaply at home, town centre pubs can be hell holes at weekends (or magnets for a certain kind of young drinker) and deserted during the week. Good honest locals are struggling too. My observation too is that many young drinkers that do find their way to the boozer, aren't drinking that much by way of beer, but ready mixes, exotic ciders and gaudily coloured spirits with Red Bull.

His conclusion is that, while the pub trade has declined, there will always be pubs of some kind for those that want them. Despite all the doom and gloom, it is important to remember that we still have two-thirds of the pubs that were trading thirty years ago, and some of them at least continue to do very healthy business.

However, as I posted here, both the geographical and social range served by pubs have become narrower over the years. The famous quote from the classic film This is Spinal Tap that the band’s appeal was “becoming more selective” is very much true of pubs as well. Whole swathes of inner cities are now pretty much devoid of pubs – see this post on Pubs of Manchester about how a recent closure has left Collyhurst in Manchester “an almost pub-free district” – while the comfortable middle classes, although they may eat in gastropubs, don’t do much actual drinking in pubs any more.

It’s also the case that closing one pub doesn’t necessarily mean that all its customers will go to another. Making a visit to a pub depends on a particular combination of opportunity and geography, and for every pub that closes, there will be a proportion of its customers who simply stop going to pubs rather than moving to one down the road, and a segment of society for whom pubgoing ceases to be something that is an option in their normal routine.

Rather than having a universal appeal, pubs in future will need to specialise in those aspects of their offer that they can do well enough to tempt people out of their living rooms. This is why, in the right location, specialist beer pubs are doing much better than bog-standard pubs, but it doesn’t mean your average estate local will prosper by putting on a range of craft kegs. Pubgoing will increasingly become a niche market, not something most people do.

In a sense it is now Wetherspoon’s who are flying the flag for pubs used by a variety of age groups and for a range of different purposes, and which anyone can walk into without looking or feeling out of place.

Another factor is that, perhaps counter-intuitively, pubs seem to thrive in areas where there is already a lot of activity, rather than locations convenient to people’s homes. We can see clusters of pubs and bars, and new openings, in places like Chorlton and Didsbury, and to some extent in areas of Stockport like Heaton Moor and Cheadle Hulme, while many pubs set amidst housing estates have closed despite the number of potential customers living nearby. That is certainly what drives Wetherspoon’s location policy.

Yes, there will still be pubs and bars in twenty years’ time, but I expect there to be a lot fewer than there are today and, outside of major city centres and prosperous inner suburbs, just going to a pub to have a drink will be something that most people rarely contemplate doing and indeed perceive as a trifle eccentric.

Edgeley-on-Thames

Great Night Out is a comedy-drama series currently showing on ITV1 at 9 pm on Friday nights, which focuses on the lives of four mid-thirties blokes purportedly living in Stockport. Much of the action seems to centre around copious consumption of pints of smooth bitter in the pub, although surely working-class men of that age would be much more likely to be drinking Carling.

Many of the exterior scenes were actually shot in Edgeley in Stockport, but the featured pub, the Admiral Lord Nelson, is actually the Queen’s Arms nearly 200 miles away in Battersea, London, which indeed as can be seen from the picture is a pub of very distinctly “London” appearance.

Some of the best TV moments of recent decades have come from comedy-drama series such as Auf Wiedersehen Pet, but unfortunately this one, while the concept is promising, is actually utterly dreadful, with cardboard characters and unlikely, contrived situations that just do not ring true on any level. Despite the interest of looking for familiar locations, I’ve now given up on it.

Probably the best pub-centred TV show I have ever seen was Early Doors, which had a couple of series on BBC2 in 2003 and 2004. This also had a strong Stockport flavour, with many local street names featuring. Although a sitcom, it was actually like a mildly exaggerated version of real pub life, which perhaps is why some critics found it rather slow-paced. One of the cast was Christine Bottomley who also features as Julie in Great Night Out.