I have just been to my local pub for the last time.
The public house is an institution in the British Isles. Alas, it’s one that is dying. Earlier this year The Telegraph reported that 6 pubs a day were closing due to the economic downturn. More recently I’ve seen a figure of 50 a week.
First, there was the smoking ban, then the recession. Meanwhile, duty on beer in the UK is almost the highest in Europe.
British beer drinkers pay over nine times the rate of duty as German consumers and seven times as much as the French, according to new figures on tax rates across the European Union from the British Beer & Pub Association. (Source)
Initially, I went to the pub more often once the air quality improved — though the cigarette stink of one’s clothes afterwards bothered me more.
Lately I have encountered insulting behaviour in pubs that in my book constitutes a handwritten, gold embossed invitation never to return:
- An establishment I have visited irregularly for years suddenly announcing that it would like 80 pence for the privilege of being paid using a debit card, which costs it nothing.
- Staff at my alternate local forgetting their manners instantly upon closing time and becoming boorish and hostile in their requests to customers to drink-up and leave.
I took a book (Good To Great by Jim Collins; it’s not bad, hahah) to my local tonight for a quick drink at closing time . I ordered a pint of beer.
That’ll be four pounds and five pence.
I was told. I thought I was hearing things, but no, I was offered a few coins in return for my £5 note.
FOUR QUID! It was £3.13 on my last visit.
I looked around. The pub was almost empty. It had annoying fruit machines, speakers everywhere playing some awful music, and cameras in the ceiling watching and recording everything. This is now the authentic London pub experience. The staff were not the same staff as on my last visit a few weeks ago (months if I am accurate). Really, it is it any wonder people choose to drink at home?
As far as I know it’s the first time I’ve paid more than four pounds for a pint of beer in a pub. It will be the last in that establishment.
The whole experience of going to a pub for a drink is now such a shadow of what it used to be, and is frankly such a rip-off, that I wouldn’t be surprised if private drinking establishments begin to spring up, if they haven’t already.
I am a member of such a club in Rome, discovered by chance in Trastevere late one night and successfully infiltrated; I have a membership card. The drinks are cheaper, in part because VAT isn’t payable.
We’ve had low-cost airlines, hotels, car rentals etc. but not low-cost pubs; the happy hour tradition is now politically incorrect or illegal, I’m not sure which. Understandably: one of the reasons booze is so heavily taxed in the UK is to try to moderate consumption, in particular to discourage binge drinking which has again become a huge problem (as illustrated here).
It’s not that I want cheap beer–that’s available in the supermarket. A little atmosphere, continuity of staff, courtesy… how can this be too much to ask for?
It will be an election issue, supposedly.
Look at this and weep: the Barley Mow, gone forever it seems.
Barley Mow snug
The snugs in the Barley Mow, little closets attached to the bar, were, I have read, places where pawnbroking and other transactions could be accomplished in private. Certainly, they provided a welcome refuge when the place was heaving and one wanted to have a quiet conversation.
Charles Babbage was born around the time the Barley Mow opened in 1791 and it could have been his local later, if he’d been inclined. It’s just a few steps from the site of his former home in Dorset Street, a few mins from where I write these words, and where he lived from 1828-1871.
Click on Mick Smee’s painting for some more paintings of London pub interiors.
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