How to save the pub

The ‘pub’ has many different roots, from the taverns that emerged to serve imported wine to the wealthy, to inns that provided food, drink and accommodation to  in town or country, and front-room public houses that exploded in popularity after the 1830 Beerhouse Act. Some places that we identify as pubs today are fiercely independent small businesses, while others are part of substantial, sometimes global, commercial operations. Some are on quiet country lanes, others are in the departure lounge. Some were purpose-built, others evolved out of diverse building types.

So what do we mean when we talk about saving the pub? Are we trying to save a particular condition, feeling, or function? Are we trying to revive something on its way to the history books, or find new uses in a changing, increasingly isolated society?

The Fox Inn, in Garboldisham, Norfolk, opened as a coaching inn at some point in the 17th century, and closed its doors, apparently forever, in 2007. At the time of its closure, the pub belonged to a company that owned over 800 pubs nationally. This company is part of a much larger global private equity, real estate and debt financing company with substantial land holdings in central London, millions of square metres of land across Europe and the United States, and ownership of a luxury superyacht brand.

In 2010, on the basis that the pub was ‘falling into disrepair’ and had been subject to vandalism in the years since its closure, planning permission was sought to convert it into a series of separate houses, without success. That same year, galvanised by their opposition to this application, the villagers began to organise around the idea of bringing the Fox back. Having registered the pub as an Asset of Community Value in 2014, a Community Interest Company funded by loans and over 60 local shareholders was able to buy it in 2016. The CIC renovated a tiny ‘micropub’ bar at one end of the now-derelict building in time for a Christmas opening, and the Fox has been open to the public three days a week ever since.

The main rooms and bar have been refurbished, but the reborn Fox also operates a lunchtime cafe aimed at families, is home to a running society and fitness group, hosts diverse pop-up food events and beer festivals, and opens specially to accompany special events in the village and national holidays. The number of stakeholders has nearly doubled since its purchase and a rota of 30 volunteers now exists to take care of all aspects of running the business. There are plans to open a more formal restaurant and to establish affordable small business workspace units to the rear of the inn. The pub now has arguably a stronger role in its community than at any point in living memory, and is also pretty good at choosing and keeping its beer.

Pubs continue to close at an alarming rate, whether in urban, suburban or rural locations. The issue has been much researched and much discussed, with the 2007 smoking ban, austerity and the cheap price of supermarket alcohol all blamed. This alongside wider social phenomena that have seen people spending more social time at home rather than in shared community spaces – be they pubs, restaurants, village halls or high streets – and a general sense that our social lives are becoming increasingly siloed. And over the past year a greater existential threat has emerged with the Covid-19 pandemic hitting pubs particularly hard. However, and even in these unprecedented circumstances, there are multiple signs that, in the right circumstances, there is plenty of life in the old pub yet. Among them the sharp rise in community-owned pubs, the re-emergence of the micropub and the increasing interest by independent, young ‘craft’ breweries in the pub trade.

The Fox is one of around 120 community-owned pubs in England. This figure doubled between 2018 and 2019, according to the Campaign for Real Ale, indicating a significant trend that seems likely to gain momentum as successful case studies pile up. This trend has, it seems, been aided by Asset of Community Value legislation which, whilst offering limited policy support to a community buy-out, does seem to provide a point around which communities can gather and build momentum around a buy-out.

The emergence of the micropub, typically in small units in urban areas where multi-roomed roadhouses and other large multi-room pubs have struggled and closed, is another positive trend. These micropubs are independently-run free houses.They tend to have strong characters behind and at the bar, and a distinctive, informed choice of drinks. They can often be seen in or near high-value locations where large, established pubs on street corners have long ago surrendered to residential conversion, and their character is an echo of the ‘beerhouses’ that emerged in the 1830s when legislation around the sale of beer was deliberately liberalised to combat gin sales.

The number of pub closures in the UK is in direct opposition to the extraordinary number of new breweries opening in recent years. Some of these new brewers are expanding into pub ownership, echoing some of their brewing predecessors, but typically they are unconstrained by corporate shareholders and have a strong commitment to making places that are as distinctive as their product. Many of the brewers taking this step are doing so as a consciously ‘local’ gesture. An example of this is London-based brewery Five Points, which recently purchased the Pembury Tavern, a 19th-century pub sited on the same Hackney traffic interchange that provided the brewery with its name.

Community-owned pubs, micropubs and what we might call ‘craft brewery taps’ are three pub types that have emerged in the last few years, pointing to an industry which is changing and mutating at the same time as its numbers are declining. In fact, pubs’ capacity to change in line with wider society, even to the extent of evolving into new types of business or ownership, seems to be one of their few consistent qualities. It is certainly more characteristic than the romantic image of the pub as somehow timeless and unchanging, one of several fictional narratives of national stability and ‘empire nostalgia’ that pervade British culture. Change is fundamental to pubs because their quality is rooted not in timelessness but in their capacity to relate, reflect and serve the communities and social contexts in which they exist. This is typically dependent on the sensitivity of the landlord and staff to the needs of their locals and how their pub might serve those needs. It is this capacity to relate meaningfully to context, rather than any magic formula of decor or product, which results in the much-mythologised ‘great local’.

For instance, a pub might open at the crack of dawn to screen an international sports event that it knows its locals care about. Exploit its context in a national park by offering morning dog walks with free food as a means of building a community. Provide a book exchange in the context of library closures. Organise a Santa visit for every child in the village at a Christmas party funded by a pub-organised charity golf tournament. Sell stamps in the absence of a post office. House a collection of local fossils. Rent out boats on the river that runs past its door. These are all real examples and barely scratch the surface of everything a great local does for and with its community. The ‘with’ becomes crucial, given how little of this might be done by pub staff alone and how much is taken on as a collaboration with diverse members of the local community.

These examples also expand the offer of a pub away from simply a place to get a pint to something far more complex and inclusive, whilst retaining the centrality of the licenced bar. In this context, the ideal of a great local is not the provincial, conservative idea it might initially seem. It is a statement of openness to change and to serving society, which is ultimately the attribute of the pub most deserving of being saved.

In all of these ways, a good pub ends up providing a space that merges the usually distinct qualities of public and private under a management structure – let’s call it landlordism – that invites us into a space that is redolent of home whilst offering something fundamentally social and shared, and then allows us to take a certain degree of social ownership over it. This combination of public and private creates a particular social condition, a space of exception, where opinions can be aired and challenged, and socially produced norms (queuing, for instance) can be subverted or suspended. It partly explains the long-running role of pubs in providing space for political movements to emerge and grow. Landlordism can take many forms, but done well it sets the conditions whereby diverse communities and individuals can feel at home while participating in a space that is privately owned, feels shared and has certain qualities of publicness. This condition is reflected in the community and in the décor. Domesticity and publicness intertwined. Public house.

There are other pub-industry trends that stand in opposition to all this progressive localness. For many years pub estates traditionally owned by breweries have been ending up in the hands of global drinks brands or private equity firms. In this context, the capacity of a landlord or team of staff to tailor their pub to the needs of their community is hugely challenged by imposed and famously inflexible rules about what drinks can and cannot be served, supported by internet-connected cellar devices that measure sales of product by the millilitre and report back automatically. The Fox was deemed an unsustainable business by its ultimately global corporate owner and was therefore closed down, but after years of dereliction it now thrives in the hands of its community, freed from beer ties and the whims of a global investment company and with a close personal working relationship to its local parish council.

If there is a single unifying factor in the pub closures of recent years it is this trend towards the generic and the corporate, whether in terms of ownership, management, aesthetics, form of lease, beer management or product. In this context, attempts to rescue or preserve pubs, even when successful, have been somewhat ham-fisted. Whilst the loss of any pub is a shame, the loss of a pub that is richly embedded in its context, and inflected by that context, is a tragedy that can have untold social impacts. Heritage practice is at present very much geared toward preserving the built character of a pub, for example, through listing. Meanwhile planning policy is rarely able to distinguish between the complex offer of a local pub and any other bar or restaurant, and as we’ve seen, this difference is fundamental.

As an example of the inadequacy of policy, there is a particularly well-loved urban local in north London that for many years had hosted music, social and community functions in its first-floor function room, including to support local social services. At a planning committee meeting where the future of the pub was at stake, the function room was deemed ‘ancillary’ to the running of the pub and was therefore lost. The pub remains open but without this crucial community space. It stands as an example of how we need much more articulate and nuanced readings of what makes up a pub’s particular offer before we can effectively advocate for, and protect, its contribution to public life.

Our approach to the heritage of the pub is also highly constraining, in part as the UK continues to not be a signatory to the 2003 UNESCO category of ‘intangible cultural heritage’. If the UK were a signatory of this designation, we could be advocating for the protection of the practice of the public house, on a par with cultural practices, crafts, foods and spaces worldwide. We could be arguing that one pub be preserved as a piece of architecture regardless of its social offer and blind to its management, simply because its design is worthy of protection because it is unique or typical. We could also be advocating for policy to protect a great local not just from development or closure but also from a much broader range of actions that might limit its capacity to deliver what its community needs.

The capacity of a pub to be shaped by and serve the complex societies it sits within is a fundamental quality that current heritage and planning practices do not adequately reflect. As society continues to build echo chamber after echo chamber, and our capacity to be together and share has been fundamentally challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic, this capacity feels more vital than ever and a key ingredient in the construction of new forms of public space and society.