The pub is not the heart of the community. It is just where the beer is...

We need to save pubs, not for a myth of roaring fires and the welcoming light across a dark street, not for a lie about the heart of the community, but because the pub is where the good beer is found

The George, Cullingworth

In my mind England is a land of beer in the same way that France is a land of wine. That we can get fine English wine and passing fair French beer doesn’t change this essential cultural fact. Nor, and I say this with a sense of pain, can we get away from the sneering disdain many of the English elite have for beer and the way the English drink beer.

“They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job and when they have got one scamp it. They have no manners, & are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a pub & drink six beers. They are mean, malicious & envious…charity, kindness, generosity are ideas they hold in contempt. They are scum”

So we hear from a typical member of the English elite, one who spent most of his life in France. I’m not sure how Somerset Maugham would undertake a celebration, he doesn’t say, but I think going to the pub for a session is a damned fine way to do that thing. And beer, occasionally cider, is not a thing to be sipped at but a beverage to be consumed in pints. Ideally in a pub.

The problem with the English middle class, and I speak as one of this breed, is that we’ve decided that the habits of Jim Dixon and his mates are altogether too plebeian and we want to be like Somerset Maugham sipping champagne on a grand terrace before enjoying a glass of French red wine with dinner at the club. We even adopted a new beer culture, craft ale, filled with sipping, tasting notes and strange foreign flavours. But I reckon that, inside all those careful, tufty bearded millennial chartered accountants, lawyers and software writers there is a real Englishman. Someone stood at the bar with five mates, who'll stand his round and drink ordinary, everyday beer in glorious celebration of it being Friday, or because the sun is shining, Chelsea won, or Jake didn’t lose his job after all.

There were three men came out of the West

Their fortunes for to try

And these three men made a solemn vow:

John Barleycorn must die

So begins the Traffic version of John Barleycorn, a song about barley and how, in the end, the nut brown ale made from that barley makes it all worthwhile:

The huntsman, he can't hunt the fox

Nor so loudly to blow his horn

And the tinker he can't mend kettle nor pot

Without a little Barleycorn

English politicians are eager to tell us that the pub is at the heart of the community and every aspiring MP has his or her picture taken in a pub often hauling on a hand pump. Councillors and campaigners leap to the defence of closing pubs despite never frequenting the places. Meanwhile these same politicians treat the enthusiastic consumption of beer as a terrible sin, give court to temperance and prohibitionist groups that masquerade as public health researchers.

The real story, however, is that the pub is not the beating heart of the community today, indeed it is doubtful whether the pub has ever been the heart of our communities. And understanding that the mantra about pubs and community is false allows us to better understand why pubs are closing. While there are over 200,000 licenced premises in Britain, fewer than 40,000 of these are pubs. And lots of those pubs are, in reality, simply restaurants housed in what used to be a pub. We like the idea of a pub, or rather a mythic version of a pub, but not the reality of the pub. Whenever the essence of England is discussed, it is only moments before wistful memories of the pub arise complete with a winding village street lined with thatched cottages, a creaking sign, and the bright lights within welcoming us to roaring fires, jugs of foaming ale, the prospect of banter and good company. In the nostalgic mind of the English, every pub is the Prancing Pony or the Red Lion Inn.

The pub was, still is where it persists, primarily a male space. Not to the exclusion of women but dominated by male conversation and the expectations of male customers. The pub was a place where a man could walk in off the street and know there’d be a welcome and likely some conversation, especially if that man was a regular. There were few expectations placed on men beyond good behaviour and respect for the mores of the boozer. You stood your round, you didn’t curse, and you kept conversation light and friendly. I recall Frank, the barman at the Reservoir Hotel pulling up a customer who was, after several pints of Guinness, berating me about some or other inadequacy of the council. “Simon comes here for a pint and some conversation not to have you bring in his day job, if you want to talk about the Council go to his office”.

The social changes that killed so many pubs (and turned others into little more than restaurants) were already under way when Frank intervened. The idea that a man might, of an evening, leave his wife and family at home and spend several hours drinking became, rightly or wrongly, seen as somehow neglectful. That women now worked and the burdens of the house expected to be shared meant that him going for a pint ran counter to modern ideas of coupledom. At the same time, central heating, TV, music centres and the easy availability of wine and beer at the supermarket meant that a pleasant and enjoyable evening could be had sitting in a comfy armchair in your own living room. For a while pubs traded on a diminishing number of men who held to the old ways and especially men who smoked.

Then, in 2007, the government decided to ban smoking in pubs. All the arguments for and against that decision have been aired but one thing is certain, the smoking ban boosted the rate at which pubs closed. It wasn’t the only factor as economic circumstances and the existing trend of closures noted above continued but, for pubs that traded on beer sales alone - ‘wet-led’ - the smoking ban was devastating as their customers stayed home where they could smoke. But the smoking ban was more of a coup de grace, the ‘wet-led’ pubs were going to close because society had changed and didn’t want male spaces. The pubs that survived were those that catered to modern coupledom with a food offer, a wine list and table service. The pub was no longer somewhere that Jim Dixon and his pals, to the disgust of Somerset Maugham, could go to celebrate with six beers and loud banter.

It is perhaps a little sad that these male spaces were lost and it is curious that, having worked hard to kill them off, middle class fussbuckets are now worrying about men’s mental health and the need for male spaces. Just male spaces designed by women and without banter or beer. The pub was never a social service but it provided a space that suited men, especially the regular sort of working man, and in doing so helped with their mental health if not their physical well-being. Now the pub is an experience, a meal out, a themed space, an entertainment. There are still places, ironically many within a short walk of Parliament, where popping in for a pint or two still happens but this part of our culture is fading away. Work and drink don’t mix, we’re told (despite Britain having built a mighty economy and a huge empire at least in part on the back of the three-course, three-pint working lunch) and, increasingly, employers even discourage after work drinks as excluding or divisive.

Despite all this England remains a land of beer. Or rather a land where a lot of blokes with ordinary jobs like to drink beer. But these blokes are as likely to do their drinking in the back garden as they are at a pub. The pandemic, by forcibly closing the pubs, gave a boost to organised garden drinking as former regulars built a shed-cum-bar, concrete paving and, to the horror of many, some artificial grass. Some even installed beer pumps to serve the beer (albeit usually lager) reproducing the idea of a pub without the prices and people you didn’t choose to speak with.

The pub was never the heart of the community but beer was - still is - a big part of our culture, and especially working class culture. Not the ‘sneer beer’ of craft ale but the idea of a good pint of warm ale or crisp lager. We may drink a lot more wine, I know I do, but a good pint of bitter remains the most English of things. I can get cold lager anywhere in the world where beer is allowed, a pint of cask conditioned, nut-brown ale is something that you really only get in Britain, and especially England. And, even if Dean and Sue have a bar in the garden, the place where you’re going to get that glorious pint of Bass, Timmy Taylors or Fullers is in a pub. This is why we need to save pubs, not from a mythic nostalgia about roaring fires and the welcoming light across the dark street, not because of some lie about pubs being the heart of the community, but because pubs are where the best beer is found.