Pubs we have loved and lost

Here’s an interesting piece of nostalgia from the Shropshire Star about pubs that have been lost in the county in recent years. The comments about pubs being caught in “planning limbo” are particularly pertinent.

A particularly agonising possibility for failed pubs is that they will be in planning limbo land. In this set of circumstances local people tend to be vociferous in wanting to keep the pub, even if they don’t often drink there themselves, and the local council supports them by refusing to give planning permission for conversion into homes, or whatever. The publican or pub company argues that the pub is not viable and that nobody wants to buy it as a pub.

And so there is a standoff. The building is in the worst of all worlds, a pub that is not a pub, and not really anything else either. If it is not occupied, it will deteriorate, with every day an incremental decrease in the chances of bringing it back to life successfully.

Empty buildings are vulnerable buildings, and a few closed pubs have been burned down.

But it’s very hard to deny that, sad though this toll of closures may be, the underlying cause is a long-term fall in demand that has rendered more and more pubs unviable.

The picture is of the interestingly-named All Labour in Vain at Horsehay in Telford.

We are all binge drinkers now

Or so someone said to me the other day. While he was referring to the modern Newspeak definition of “binge drinking”, that is, having more than three drinks in one session, rather than the original meaning of “drunk for days”, I could see what he meant. Drinking, at least in pubs, has become a specific leisure pursuit to be indulged on weekend evenings, and no longer something that is woven into the fabric of everyday life. Gone are the couple of pints on Friday lunchtime, the pre Sunday lunch appetiser, the swift call on your way home from work, the quick pub visit after the cinema or the football match.

This is reinforced by the increasingly widespread belief, which I have seen reflected in the comments on here, that as soon as a so much as a half of mild has crossed your lips, then the rest of the day has to be written off. Many pubs report business holding up well on Friday and Saturday nights, but for the rest of the week find themselves increasingly empty. And this is all part of the process of the insidious denormalisation of regular, moderate alcohol consumption which surely is the key to responsible drinking.

Well, someone believes in pubs

For once, here’s a story of pub advance rather than pub retreat. The two pictures to the right show the Flying Horse, an impressively large, brand new pub close to Manchester Airport which is due to open next Monday. The specific location is here. Many people would think of this as Heald Green, but in fact it’s just over the border into Manchester.

However, leaps of joy may be cut short for some on learning that it’s the latest branch of Greene King’s Hungry Horse chain.

Don’t say you weren’t warned

Spotted on Twitter:

An unpalatable truth

This post is to a large extent a rehash of others I have made in the past. Some people aren’t going to like it, but it needs to be said.

I can well understand how people who have suffered at the hands of the pub companies feel very aggrieved about it, and are thus motivated to campaign against the companies’ policies. But, as with single-issue campaigners of all kinds, it is all too easy to allow it to expand into an over-arching narrative that explains everything. To listen to some of them, you would get the impression that the primary reason for the decline of the pub trade in the past twenty years has been greedy, incompetent pub companies acting in association with rapacious supermarkets and property developers and bungling local authorities. However, this, whether through simple ignorance or a blinkered refusal to confront the facts, completely fails to recognise the wider picture.

In the period since 1979, beer sales in pubs have declined by over 60%, and around a third of the pubs in the country have closed. There has been a marked long-term secular decline in the demand for pubs which goes far beyond the specifics of individual businesses. Obviously, in an overall declining market, it will tend to be the better-run pubs that survive, and the worse-run ones that go to the wall, but the underlying reason for pubs closing en masse is not that they have been sold off in large number for alternative use despite being profitable, nor that they have been allowed to become tatty, unwelcoming, badly-managed dumps. Indeed, the average pub now is much better run and more welcoming that it was in 1979.

Are those who are mainly laying it at the door of the pubcos really denying there’s been much impact from the decline of heavy industry, inner-city depopulation, influx of people from cultures with no pubgoing tradition, changing gender roles, discouragement of lunchtime drinking at work, denormalisation of drink-driving within the legal limit or the smoking ban?

I asked the question here what difference it would may to the overall pub market if the average pub was run as well as the best. The conclusion was that overall trade would be unlikely to increase by more than a few percentage points. To suggest that pubs could have held on to most of the lost trade by being run differently is frankly ludicrous. It’s on a par with arguing that the collapse of transatlantic passenger shipping in the 1960s was mainly due to badly-run shipping lines. In mature markets, variations in the quality of what is on offer play a relatively minor role in determining the overall level of demand. I regularly visit a number of well-run, appealing family brewery tied houses that have certainly not been allowed to decay and can demonstrate long-term continuity in management and general offer. But they have haemorrhaged trade too, just as surely as the most inconsistently-run pubco outlet, even if not quite to the same degree.

Equally, while I’m sure there have been cases of profitable pubs being sold off for redevelopment as flats or convenience stores, there are few areas of the country where there aren’t plenty of recently-closed pubs in all kinds of locations that would be available on a freehold basis to anyone wanting an entry into the trade. There must be at least half a dozen in central Stockport alone. The fact that would-be pub entrepreneurs haven’t snapped these sites up suggests that they don’t see a potential market there, and those who whine that “pubs only close because they’re shit” always seem strangely reluctant to put their money where their mouth is. While matters may be different in some parts of inner London subject to intense development pressures, I’m not aware of a single pub around here sold for conversion to alternative use that previously could have been said to be thriving.

I do not for a minute seek to defend the policies of the pubcos, but they are essentially a desperate reaction to declining demand, not a cause. The pubcos borrowed up to the hilt to bet the farm on a projected outcome that just didn’t happen, and are now counting the cost. The current “pub crisis” is essentially a crisis of demand, not supply. All the planning controls and development restrictions in the world won’t save a single pub if the underlying demand isn’t there in the first place. While it may be possible to turn round a failing, badly-run pub, for the most part that will simply be at the expense of others appealing to the same population of potential customers. It does little or nothing to affect the overall size of the market. For plenty of closed pubs, it is possible to come up with a narrative that might have allowed it to do better. For the overall market, it is much more difficult, unless you’re suggesting rewinding thirty years of social and economic change.

If you fail to understand the true nature of the problem, whether through ignorance or choice, you are never going to come up with a solution. Indeed it does the pub trade as a whole a disservice for people to insist on peddling a narrative for its decline which at best is exaggerated and at worst utterly delusional. Quite frankly, some of the more strident anti-pubco campaigners end up being simply anti-pub.

Some have accused me of not really supporting pubs, but any lasting acquaintance with this blog will disabuse you of that notion. But I acknowledge that social changes have made huge swathes of pubs unviable, regrettable as it may be in many cases, and don’t go about flogging dead horses. You can still be a railway enthusiast while admitting there isn’t really a case for reopening the Cleobury Mortimer branch. I recognise that every pub is a business too, which some seem not to, and they cannot be kept alive by fossilising the trading patterns of the past through the planning system. Nor is it desirable to try to help business sectors you feel sentimental about by artificially skewing the market in their favour – all that will do is postpone the evil day and very likely in the end result in a worse outcome.

Spreading your favours

This wasn’t trying to prove any point, just aiming to find out to what extent people on a weekend night out confine their custom to a single pub or spread it around a number of different ones. The results show a wide variety of choices , with roughly equal numbers preferring just the one, or two, or not going in for that kind of thing anyway, and slightly more tending to go to three or more.

Craft vs Premium

I think it was Boak and Bailey who pointed out this article entitled Is Craft Killing Big Beer – Not Through Sales, But Brand Status Erosion? It’s about the US beer market, and what is very interesting is how different it is from the situation in this country. For a start, if you try to extrapolate the US definition of “craft beer” to the UK it would undoubtedly include all cask beer and all premium bottled ales, which is certainly not how it is perceived here.

We have also never seen any consistent efforts by brewers to develop “premium” beer brands. As I argued here, premium prices tend to apply to one beer category over another, and between upmarket and downmarket pubs, but not to any great extent within individual categories. In recent years, of course, one of the greatest successes of premium beer branding was “reassuringly expensive” Stella Artois, but the brand owners destroyed that image by being too keen to pursue the mass market (not to mention cheapening the recipe) and it has now just become another commodity product. Nowadays, the beer that seems to have acquired that cachet is Peroni, which significantly is not available in cans and never seen on discount at ASDA. Over the years, Guinness has also successfully maintained a premium position, to some extent because it defines its own category and has no effective challengers.

In the past, the national brewers managed to secure something of a price premium in the market because their beers were widely known and advertised, and therefore perceived as superior to the artisanal products of the local independent brewers. I have an early edition of CAMRA’s guide to Derbyshire Ale which displays an obvious preference for Burton beers – Bass, Ind Coope and Marston’s – over the more plebeian output of the Nottingham brewers. That’s largely gone now, as are many of the beers, but it’s still noticeable that pub company pubs, which in many cases have been inherited from the Big Six, tend to charge more than the remaining family brewers.

At least in UK terms, craft beer is perceived as one or more of unusual, extreme, challenging, an acquired taste, something that appeals to geeks, enthusiasts and aficidionados. This isn’t the case in the US, where much of the volume classed under craft is beers like Samuel Adams and Brooklyn Lager which, although coming across as better and more characterful than Budweiser or Miller Lite, are not so much so as to challenge the consumer. Therefore, a drinker who sees himself as discerning, and wants to be seen as such, could happily order one in a bar in a way that his British counterpart would never dream of ordering something described as a “craft beer”.

The key to the marketing concept of “premium” is that it is something that is a clear step up from the mainstream, in the quality and authenticity of ingredients and also, crucially, in how others perceive it. By choosing a premium product, you may well feel more satisfied with your purchase, but you will also make a point to other people that you are a person of discernment, and that you can afford it. But it still retains a link to the mainstream; it is not something that is different to the point of being offputting. It is Tesco Finest over Tesco standard, Audi over Volkswagen.

If you are a business person, staying in a hotel overnight with colleagues and charging your bill to expenses, and you go into the bar, what beer do you order to suggest you are someone of taste and discernment, but not some obscurantist geek? That is the question that “premium” has to answer. The true connoisseur, of course, would say with some justification, that it is largely a marketing construct anyway.

The wine and spirit markets operate rather differently, as in general as you progress up the price scale you will encounter products that are “more so” rather than dramatically different from the mainstream ones. But beer, at least in the UK, doesn’t really work like that.

Wow!

Some surprisingly positive figures in the latest BBPA British Beer Barometer. The statistics for the third quarter of 2013 show a 5.2% rise in beer sales compared with the same quarter last year, no doubt boosted by the prolonged spell of hot weather. This is the best quarter-on-quarter figure for the whole series of statistics dating back to 1997. However, the overall figure conceals a 12.5% rise in off-trade sales, balanced by a 1.2% fall in the on-trade, which maybe was not quite what CAMRA were looking for when they campaigned for the end of the duty escalator.

As always, the annualised figures give a better view of overall trends. Overall sales are 2.2% down year-on-year, with the off-trade only 0.1% lower, but the on-trade showing a fall of 4.2%, which in fact is higher than last year. So actually little change from the existing trend there, and no evidence that the duty cut has actually delivered any boost to pubs. Indeed, it looks as though the long-term movement from on- to off-trade, which seemed to have stalled for a while, has now resumed.

Too much eye of newt?

Pendle Witches Brew, from Moorhouse’s in Burnley, was one of the flagship beers of the early microbrewery revolution. Weighing in at a powerful 5.1% ABV, it was a dangerously drinkable strong pale ale of a type not seen before in Britain. Perhaps the beer closest in general style was Hall & Woodhouse Tanglefoot.

It’s not an especially hoppy beer in the modern IPA style, instead being relatively light-bodied with a balance of malt and hop, a slight honey note and a noticeable alcohol kick. It doesn’t tend to be stocked in the supermarkets I regularly visit but I often like to pick up a bottle when I do see it. So I was pleased to see in appearing at a very reasonable £1.50 a bottle as part of Morrison’s recent Halloween promotion.

However, the first bottle I had threw a distinct haze and didn’t taste quite right either. Thinking it might just be an unusual susceptibility to fridge chill, I just kept the second in a cool cupboard, but that was hazy too. Matthew Lawrenson of Seeing the Lizards fame has reported similar problems on Twitter.

So I sent a complaint off to Moorhouse’s and, to their credit, they sent me a tray of eight bottles. These had a later best before date and were just as good as I would have expected them to be. So, a beer well worth a try if you see it, but avoid bottles with a Best Before of July 2014.

The captive market fallacy

If I had a pint for every time I’ve heard someone say “you’d have to be an idiot to fail with that pub, it’s the only one for the best part of a mile in any direction”, then I would be very drunk indeed. But, while it might seem an obvious conclusion to draw, in practice the pub trade just doesn’t work like that, and in fact in recent years isolated pubs in the middle of residential areas, whether council estate or owner-occupied, have often seemed unusually vulnerable to closure.

For example, we have lost the Reddish Vale in Reddish, the Bromale in Bramhall, the Cotton Tree in Withington, the Fallowfield in Fallowfield and the Sylvan Inn in Timperley (illustrated). No doubt you can think of plenty more in and around your local area. Places like Edgeley and Hazel Grove have seen the closure of pubs in the backstreets like the Hollywood, the Gardeners Arms and the Royal Oak, while they continue in business in significant numbers on their main streets. For each individual pub you might say that it wasn’t well run, or didn’t receive any investment, or the area went downhill, or the ethnic mix changed, but across the board there’s a consistent pattern.

I’ve written in the past that coming home from work, having your tea and then going out to the local has never been quite such a universal pattern of pubgoing as often imagined. And, while I make no claim for this poll being scientific, the respondents seemed to favour after-work drinking which doesn’t tend to take place in residential locals. Even if people are going out for a drink later in the evening, they will often favour village and town centres where there is a choice of venues and a bit of a buzz. How many of the drinkers in the Crown and the Magnet in Stockport will have passed numerous pubs nearer to their houses to get there? All the cluster of new bars in Chorlton are on the main shopping streets, not tucked away in isolation in backwoods shopping parades.

Plenty of people will still see ease of access as a good reason for visiting a pub, but it has to have something else going for it as well. If your local pub actually is good, then why not? But if the only reason you’re going there is because it’s on your doorstep, then it’s already lost the battle. In some cases, pubs of this type that are situated on main roads have been able to survive by adding a substantial food trade to their mix, but that doesn’t work for all and is very much dependent on the area. But it should not be underestimated how much sheer visibility adds to a pub’s prospects – the simple act of regularly passing it in a car, or on a bus, makes it much more likely you will consider visiting it on another occasion.

The wrong kind of business?

Brandon Lewis, the “Minister for High Streets”, recently attracted a lot of criticism when he said that popular fast food outlets such as McDonalds and Burger King were “massively important” to the success of Britain’s high streets. One person on Twitter even went so far as to refer to it as a “Gerald Ratner moment”.

However, surely he has a point that the success of high streets is crucially dependent on them containing businesses that people actually want to visit, and you can’t be too sniffy about what kinds of businesses they actually are. You could easily add Wetherspoon’s to that list. Much of the criticism seems to be driven less by a concern for standards of nutrition than by rank snobbery – you have to wonder whether there would have been the same reaction had he referred to Prezzo and the Gourmet Burger Kitchen.

Many so-called “High Street Campaigners” seem to have an unrealistic, dewy-eyed vision of them filled with hand-made toy shops, organic cafés, ethnic delicatessens and craft beer micropubs which is a world away from the reality of betting shops, pound shops and nail parlours. It is the kind of attitude satirised (I assume) by Lawrence Hennigan when he said that if Levenshulme won a “Portas pilot” bid, “the government grant would be used to spruce up empty shops, which would then be filled by start-up businesses selling art, crochet knitting and cupcakes.”

In truth, a lot of those who in theory profess their support for High Streets – and for pubs – in practice seem to want to do their best to ensure those institutions fail. Councils often seem to do far more to deter particular kinds of businesses from opening up than encouraging business in general.

The disease of “Public Health”

More excellent stuff from Chris Snowdon in this must-read extended essay on how the tyranny of “Public Health” is seeking to extend ever closer control over people’s lifestyles.

The slippery slope was both predictable and predicted. The only surprise is how little time it took for the British public to taken in, when only a few years earlier they would have scoffed at the idea of drinkers and salad-dodgers being next in line. Once again, all it took was a change in terminology. A ‘binge-drinker’ had traditionally been someone who went on a session lasting several days. Now it means anyone who consumes more than three drinks in an evening. Similarly, the crude and arbitrary nineteenth century measure of body mass index (BMI) has been used to categorise the chubby as ‘obese’ and the fat as ‘morbidly obese’. Sugar is ‘addictive’ now - and ‘toxic’. ‘Big Food’ is the new ‘Big Tobacco’. The anti-smoking blueprint of advertising bans, tax rises and ‘denormalisation’ provides the roadmap for action. At this stage, there is nothing to be gained from saying we told you this would happen, but we told you this would happen.

And he concludes:

The issue of risk should also be viewed from the right end of the telescope. In a society in which almost everybody willingly puts themselves at risk, those who attempt to lead lives of ascetic self-denial should be regarded as curious outliers. They have every right to pursue extreme longevity if that is their wish, but they have no right to bully and cajole those of us who prefer the good life into emulating them. Whether they are well-intentioned do-gooders, sly charlatans or malevolent bigots, they must be tolerated in a civilised society, but they do not have to be suffered gladly and they should never be given the reins of power. It is time to denormalise the demagogues of ‘public health’.

Assets of dubious value

The 2011 Localism Act allowed local authorities to designate non-residential buildings as “assets of community value”:

Nominations for community assets can be made by parish councils or by groups with a connection with the community. Individuals cannot nominate community assets. If the nomination is accepted, the group will be given time to come up with a bid for the asset when it is sold.

The right to bid only applies when an asset’s owner decides to dispose of it. There is no compulsion on the owner of that asset to sell it. The scheme does not give first refusal to the community group, unlike the equivalent scheme in Scotland; and it is not a community right to buy the asset, just to bid. This means that the local community bid may not be the successful one.

So far, over 170 pubs across the country have been granted this status. However, it’s important to note that it is no more than a means of buying time for threatened pubs. And, while it may work in well-off villages in National Parks, it’s unlikely to be of much value to urban pubs in transient communities with other nearby alternatives. The most likely result is pubs remaining closed and blighted for months with no realistic prospect of ever coming back to life. It stems from a misty-eyed view of “community pubs” when, in reality, most local residents will never go in their nearest pub from one year to the next and many will see a pub not as a cherished local hub but as a source of nuisance and late-night noise.

There’s a classic example of this in the campaign to save the Chesham Arms (pictured) in Hackney in East London, where the owner has failed in an attempt to have its status as an ACV rescinded. It’s a nice-looking building, but it is right in the middle of a residential area, and the name of the owner perhaps gives an indication as to why its prospects are uncertain. All this is likely to do is to delay its conversion to flats. Incredibly, the campaigners even want the council to compulsorily purchase it to maintain its status as a pub, which surely is taking socialism a bit too far.

This whole approach exemplifies the misguided view that I referred to here that the recent decline of pubs is mainly due to a combination of pubs being poorly run, and being sold off by greedy pub companies acting in association with rapacious supermarkets and property developers. I do not for a minute seek to defend the policies of the pubcos, but they are essentially a reaction to declining demand, not a cause. The pubcos borrowed up to the hilt to bet the farm on a projected outcome that just didn’t happen, and are now counting the cost.

The fact is that there has been a long-term secular decline in the overall demand for pubs which no amount of good management and enlightened corporate governance can do much to reverse. I wrote about the reasons behind this here. The current “pub crisis” is essentially a crisis of demand, not supply. All the planning controls in the world won’t save a single pub if the underlying demand isn’t there in the first place. While it is possible to turn round a failing, badly-run pub, for the most part that will simply be at the expense of others appealing to the same population of potential customers. It does little or nothing to affect the overall size of the market.

And it really does the pub trade no favours for people to insist on peddling a narrative for their decline which at best is exaggerated and at worst utterly delusional.

What pubs get wrong

The Guardian recently published an interesting article on Ten things that bad boozers get wrong. Some of them I agree with, some I’m not too bothered about. The comments also make enjoyable reading – a bit like all the comments on beer blogs distilled into one place. See if you can spot me! The issue of dogs seems to come up rather a lot.

I thought I should make my own list, but concluded that, rather than just regurgitating the familiar moans about children, TV football, bench seating and lack of beermats, I should concentrate on those areas that genuinely are within the control of those running pubs and make a real difference to the customer experience.

• A poor impression when walking through the door, such as a group of regulars blocking the way to the bar
• Failure to display a menu outside (and sometimes not displaying menus inside when food is being served)
• Music played by default without regard to tastes of customers
• Bar staff not committed to customer service (which covers a variety of sins, such as not serving people in the right order and messing around doing non-urgent tasks rather than actually serving)
• A thoughtless approach to temperature and ventilation, such as doors flung open on cool days and heating on full blast on warm days
• Uncollected glasses and plates piled up on tables
• Poor use of the Internet – not every pub needs a website, but if you have one, keep it updated, display your current menu and, if you offer varying guest beers, your current beer selection

One that is less of a problem in these days of the knocked-through pub, but which in the past I often found an irritation, is failing to make it clear which door the casual customer should use – which isn’t by any means always the lounge.

A breath of controversy

My recent post about the under-representation of family brewers in the Good Beer Guide made the point that some of them had been effectively excluded because they had a declared policy of using cask breathers in their pubs. So I thought I would ask blog readers whether this was an issue that concerned them.

As you can see, for the vast majority either it would make no difference to whether they visited a pub, or they simply couldn’t care less. And a rather larger handful said it would make them more likely to use a pub than those who said less likely.

For those not familiar with the device, a cask breather is a demand valve that is attached to the spile hole of a cask and, when beer is drawn off, replaces it with the same volume of CO2 at atmospheric pressure. The image to the right shows how it works. Properly set up, it should not result in the beer becoming over-carbonated and will prolong its shelf-life by preventing air getting to the beer. CAMRA’s guide to cellarmanship suggests it may be used as a way of serving cask beer in outlets with low or erratic turnover where otherwise the only alternative would be keg.

Despite repeated calls for a change in policy, CAMRA has always set its face against any official acceptance of cask breathers on the grounds that it could be the thin end of the wedge – once allowed for marginal outlets, it would soon become the norm across whole estates. Indeed, this seems to be what has happened with some of the “excluded” breweries. Many Sam Smith’s pubs will empty a cask of Old Brewery Bitter – their sole cask beer – in less than a day, and therefore using a cask breather would appear pointless.

However, extensive taste tests have failed to establish that even experienced and knowledgeable drinkers can tell the difference between beer kept under a cask breather and without one. Plus, in an age when we have the strange combination of declining beer sales and increasing numbers of beers on the bar, stopping beer going off has become an issue for very many pubs, not just a few low-volume ones. I’ve certainly had plenty of flat, tired pints in recent years that might well have benefited from the use of a cask breather. As the poll shows, few beer drinkers seem to be remotely bothered.

There are some interesting comments on Pete Brown’s blog here from Jeff Rosenmeier (who admittedly has an axe to grind as the boss of keg-only brewery Lovibonds) who says “The ONLY way you would KNOW if a pub was using a cask breather would be that you no longer get rancid pints.”

Is this perhaps a case of “the best being the enemy of the good” and, faced with a choice of either drinkable cask beer kept under a cask breather, cask beer that has gone off, or keg beer, isn’t the first realistically the best option? It’s another example where some flexibility might be desirable rather than adopting a strict black and white approach.