I think now of the rural Home Counties area in which I grew up, a collection of small villages that fairly abounded with pubs twenty-five years ago. Now, within a radius of just a couple of miles, there are four that have been converted into a house or houses, one that is now an Indian restaurant, one that took on a stupid name (the Cranky Weasel), another that became an American diner (an incarnation that did not last) and two that have been demolished. These changes seemed to happen by stealth. Every so often, as I was driving back for a visit, I would perceive that oh, that pub where I once stood on the first floor balcony with a Campari and orange (I was always trying new drinks in my teens) and watched the lumbering cricketers on the green … while I was away, its identity had been obliterated. The shape was the same, the balcony where I had stood was still there; but now the fittings were painted in that subdued pistachio which denotes upward mobility, every brick stood out in that modern-old way as if the interstices had been dental-flossed, and there was a too-large, blank-looking gap between the upstairs windows, visible perhaps only to those who knew that it had once framed the golden words ‘The Bell’… The pub was still there, and the pub was no more.
Those that remain, meanwhile, play every trick in the book to keep going. Quiz nights, karaoke nights, happy hours, suntrap gardens, outdoor heaters, the Ashes on TV, the 6 Nations on TV, the Euros on TV, OAP lunches for a fiver, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas Day, Summer Pimm’s, Winter Warmers: anything that is over and above what a pub used to be.
There is no mystery as to why this has happened, why the pure-breed pub is dying. It couldn’t be simpler to understand. Things don’t stay the same. A process of evolution made the pub, and that process has not stopped. People have changed, the nation has changed, laws have changed. The advent of the breathalyser in 1967, followed by a succession of increasingly tough campaigns against drink-driving; the smoking ban in 2007; the availability of alcohol in every outlet, from corner shops to garages; the cheapness of supermarket alcohol, which in the 1970s began to see off the shops that stood within the bigger pubs, and which now undercuts the pubs themselves; the sexual revolution that has rendered quaint, at best, the notion of the male drinking arena; the primacy of children; the attendant notion that most outings should centre upon the family, rather than its adult members; the demographic shifts that have created a plurality within the national culture; the upward mobility that has led people away from familiar social spheres; the marketing of leisure, which has led people on a continual quest for novelty; the all-conquering phenomenon of the coffee chain; the fascination with food; etc.
Thus listed, these read like good things. They are good things, on the whole. Progressive, civilising improvements. Pubs still exist, after all, but they have evolved to survive in a different world. An improved world. And anyway, who would prefer to drink in a place of fug and beer mats, dining off peanuts, tracing dot-to-dot cigarette burns in the red velveteen, seeing their reflection swoon in a green-spotted mirror, when they could be in a low-lit interior with bleached beams, surrounded by happy groups eating at scrubbed wooden tables, with a wine list of well-sourced complexity and an olives menu?
Oh, I don’t know. I would.
My grandmother always thought that food made all the difference to a pub. When food became the point, the pub became something that was not quite a pub. This is not infallible doctrine: there are gastropubs steeped in atmosphere, places that she herself would have loved. Those pub precursors, the tavern and the coffee house, supplied meals. So too, indeed, did some pubs in the mid-twentieth century. Patrick Hamilton, as reliable as it gets on this particular subject, wrote of ‘businessmen’s lunches’ served at the Friar (the best hostelry in Reading) and blotting-paper sandwiches eaten at the bar in London pubs. George Orwell’s imaginary dream pub, the Moon Under Water, also offers a ‘good, solid lunch’ for three shillings and even has a snack counter (in fact this pub, which Orwell conjured in an essay of 1946, is a mixture of the dutifully traditional and the idealistically Shavian: it has Victorian décor, draught beer and homely middle-aged barmaids, but it also has children running from the garden and into the bars, accompanied by their mothers, on the grounds that families are a wholesome influence upon the drinking male).
Regarding food: it is stipulated in both Orwell and Hamilton that lunches are taken ‘upstairs’, away from the main body of the pub. The Moon Under Water’s snack counter notwithstanding, food is still an adjunct; my grandmother’s stance against the centrality of food was not therefore contrary. She took it from her father, but again he would never have adopted it against his own interests. If his customers had really wanted food, he would have supplied it. As my grandmother did, from the mid-1908s. It was the beginning of the end, but she was too pragmatic not to know that it would, otherwise, have been the end. ‘Times have changed,’ she said, in that fatalistic tone of hers, which increasingly contained an underlying fractiousness. ‘Pub’s not a bloody cayff … thing is, Dad didn’t open up in the morning for a couple of old buggers sitting with a couple of bloody halves for two hours … how am I supposed to make anything on that? And I’ve got the lights on, the radiators on …’ Victor would smoke philosophically, waiting for the storm to pass, while Irene (loving it) would make remarks of this considered kind: ‘I heard old Rex and Sheila had started going to the White Horse lunchtimes, shame after all these years coming here, wouldn’t think they would, would you.’
It was quite true that the pub struggled for morning trade. Oh, those effortful hours of discreet swallows and clinks; of glasses replaced upon the counter or the table in the exact position that they had occupied before, this painstaking accuracy using up another moment or two of life; of sighs, made as it were publicly, with an air of wryly defeated irony, in the hope that they would lead to conversation (‘Ah well’; ‘What’s up then, eh?’; ‘Oh just the usual, getting old, can’t do much about that, can I?’; ‘Stop bloody moaning then’– another minute used). These were hours spent waiting for closing time, even for the handful of customers who had been waiting all morning for opening. This, of course, was un-pub-like. Pubs are where time acquires an exquisite value. But the mornings now refused to coalesce in that essential swooning way. The butcher, the ferocious old farmer, had staggered off to drink on more celestial planes, taking with them something of the old pub quality and regretted with a lyricism that was not, on the face of it, appropriate – and yet here I am, more than thirty years on, doing the same thing. The soigné urban customers – the type that had arrived with a fat crunch of tyre upon gravel, importing a sense of largesse and the scent of L’Air du Temps – they had indeed, as Irene said, begun to seek food with their lunchtime drink. The ecstatic throb of spirits hitting an empty gut belonged to a headier past. ‘Can’t do it now,’ they would say. ‘Anno domini!’ For all their defiance, these people, pub people, were moving into a dimmer light, closer to the wings. If my mother and I encountered them in another setting – pushing a trolley round the supermarket, queuing in the chemist – they looked like figures from another world, their crumbling spines held up by bandbox tailoring, still expectant of courtesy and a speck of fun. ‘How’s Vi?’ they would always say, a flash of guilt in their eyes. ‘We’ll be in to see her soon.’ But most lunchtimes they were settling themselves into a table at the White Horse, or the Hope and Anchor, fumbling helplessly with sachets of tartare sauce and eating scampi in a basket. ‘A bloody basket!’ my grandmother would say. Food in a basket was not new, but until then it had been something that she could ignore. Now the brewery, polite and just short of insistent, was suggesting that she herself might consider lunchtime catering.
She knew that it was not simply a question of customers falling off their stools like parrots from perches; nor indeed of her own age. It was change. ‘It’s a different world,’ she would say. She could still put it in its place, but despite herself she was in its clutches, just as she had been thirty years earlier, when that different world chucked her out of the
old pub. In her magnificence she had maintained her own pub as an immutable entity, an unshakeable bulwark against Suez, the Summer of Love, the Winter of Discontent, the lot. And it had been easy, really, because she held the cards: people wanted their pub. This was still true, but it was no longer true in quite the same way.
I have two images of her pub, not entirely distinct, yet differing in some elusive quality of tone, of resonance. There is the warm-lit tawny one of childhood, with its voluptuous overspill of physical memory. Then there is this slightly later one, more clear-lit and precise, without that romantic sense of infinite depth and mystery, deriving from the time when my grandmother gave in and began to ‘do food’. She was quite right – it did change the pub, but change was happening anyway. The food was merely a symbol of that. It must have been happening throughout my childhood, although I would not have noticed. It had started before I was born, indeed had been going on throughout the entirety of my grandmother’s reign at the pub. As early as 1961, it was estimated that a pub closed almost every day. So the decline has quickened, but its inception is not recent. During the war, people had been uncomplicatedly grateful to pubs (just as they were to greyhound racing, which reached a peak of 50 million attendances in 1945 and has been dying ever since). Afterwards other things came along. The war and its mindset were over, so too any concept of gratitude to its parochial pleasures: it was time for pubs to take their place in a hierarchy that included package holidays, Berni Inns and The Forsyte Saga.
The process whereby pubs ceased to be the cornerstone of people’s lives was slow, however. They were still loved. They still are loved. But gradually they ceased to be intrinsic to society; only to certain members of society, for example the trio on the settle in my grandmother’s public bar, who now comprised the greater part of her morning clientele and whose appearance, for which she herself should have been grateful, induced a kind of irritable pity. ‘Oh Christ, now for some fun,’ she would mutter as she stood at the window in habitual pose, coffee cup and ashtray balanced on the top of her armchair, and observed the appallingly punctual arrival of the sad-eyed little woman and the charmless man (‘Mork and Mindy’, as she called them). The ex-POW – playing it cool – was always about half an hour later (‘You made it then, we thought you’d found yourself a bird,’ the charmless man would chuckle grimly, as the poor old boy forced his stilt-like legs across the threshold). ‘I’ll go out there then, shall I?’ This was Irene, emerging from the shadows, her voice as dry as desiccated coconut past its sell-by date. ‘Oh good old girl,’ my grandmother would vaguely reply. She remained at the window, her cheek inclined against her new chihuahua (Tom and Ted having sighed their delicate last). Except at weekends, she rarely changed out of her housecoat until evening opening.
Without the ballast of unquestioned love, the absolute knowledge that it was wanted, the pub faltered. It was like a girl who had had the choice of any man and who now – with the swollen bloom fading from her – had to coax admiration from lesser suitors. Not at night: those evenings still bloomed as of old. But in the mornings there was no sense of possibility – as there had been, in the past: even when the bars remained empty and the door latches untouched, there had been the belief, always, that the trio on the settle would be swept up into something larger than themselves, that the limits of their personalities would be transcended, that this brief span of time would dimple and soften and acquire a small kindly magic to warm the rest of the day … without that belief, the sense that it held within itself something ineffable and desired, what was the pub? It was a couple of rooms where misfits gathered because a glass of beer pushed away thoughts of death. Drink could alleviate that particular reality too, of course. Nevertheless, it hovered.
Decline did not begin in the 1980s, yet there was something about that time that was inimical to pubs. It wasn’t just the economic shifts, the increased business rates and land values. It was the aspirational quality that was unleashed by money-centricity, all that Sloane Ranger Handbook and property porn and Filofax-flaunting, which in different form is still with us. However derided and despised that period may now be, some of the change that it effected went too deep for eradication. For pubs, certainly. Put very simply, the pubs that moved with the times, that acquired wine lists and logos and a matte veneer, became a part of that brighter new world. The pubs that were left behind, that retained their connection to the bench and the sawdust, that for all their roughness remained innocent – they were implicitly the habitat of the unevolved, the victims, those who had failed to aspire.
One can overdo the retrospectivity. People did not, in 1980, suddenly remove the safety pins from their eyebrows and start dressing like extras in a Robert Palmer video. Change moves by degrees, from the subliminal to the overt; one sees it suddenly, and therefore it seems that the change itself has been sudden. For instance I remember that there was a moment, in my grandmother’s pub, when it was as though all the women who had once drunk spirits were now holding glasses of white wine. I have absolutely no idea how long it took for this change to manifest itself. All I can say is that the manifestation happened in the 1980s. It was not so much a fashion as an expression of certain societal shifts. Wine signified something different from those shallow tots of gin and whisky: it was more modern, more cosmopolitan, ostensibly more healthful (the 1980s saw the start of the fitness obsession, which again did not help the pub).
Also, it was feminised. In those days men would never have ordered wine unless with food, and not always then. Women were becoming more visible within the drinking arena, not as gin-sipping adjuncts to their suave males, but as presences in their own right. The sharp division between public and saloon bar – which was as much about gender as income – became fuzzier. More women worked, more mothers worked; the great first wave of feminism was rippling through real lives. Therefore women, like men, sought their alcoholic reward and relaxation. They also, increasingly, wanted to ‘eat out’, not just for their lunch break but in the evening, because as workers they were disinclined to prepare dinner (as they would still have been expected to do) when they returned home. And then, as working mothers, they sought places where they could eat en famille. Again, the change was not sudden: women had always worked. Look at my grandmother and her friends. Look at the work done during both world wars. The percentage of women in employment did rise in the 1980s, but not noticeably until the end of the decade. Nevertheless, the perception, the imagery – the Working Girl power shoulders – were potent.
And it was this – the power of ‘image’ – that was perhaps the greatest change of all, leading as it did to self-awareness as a normal condition. Today this has reached its endgame with the smartphone. But the psychological change, the desire to inhabit images – to behave as if one were starring in a film about oneself, or moving around within an advert for oneself – surely began in the 1980s: when a lifestyle rather than a life became the aim, and the individual became supreme as never before.
My grandmother saw all this, and understood it perfectly without articulating it. ‘Potty sod, putting himself about,’ was as far as she went, when for example a man whose dream was to be identified as a yuppie entered the saloon, asked for a menu, and left with a brutal flash of Porsche key-fob on being told that food was not to be had. She blamed it all upon television. She believed that it threw back at us a vision of human nature that tampered irreparably with the reality. She herself loved watching television, but she was old enough to see life through a screen for what it was: not life. She could not have foreseen Instagram and vlogging and the rest, and would have viewed them as the products of insanity, but they are only an extension of the same premise.
In the pub, of course, simply being was enough. The pub made that special without changing it. The black lacquered wine bar, however, created an apparent infinity of shallow reflections. It was by nature self-aware, as if at any moment Adrian Lyne might drop in for a location shot. I remember a town pub that I visited at weekends from the age o
f about fourteen (naturally, boys were the lure; it was local to a minor public school). My friends and I spent about a third of the evening in the Ladies’, rolling flavoured gloss on to our lips, brushing our hair over our faces then swooping it back again, but we loved the lively, tatty jostle of the place. I, the unbearable expert, pronounced it a very good pub. Then, one day, the King’s Arms became KINGS: the inn sign was replaced by meretricious lettering, the pub seating by tall tables surrounded by high stools, the usual drinks by a ‘menu’ of indeterminate wines, the jukebox by ‘Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby’ on repeat. This was a harbinger of what pubs would be up against, as the drinking establishment – always evolving – moved on to encompass the world of aspiration, and hapless provincial bars were rendered fit to be seen on the Fulham Road.
Country pubs like my grandmother’s did, however, have an imagistic power that required no physical change, rather an exaggerated preservation of their rural chiaroscuro. Just as the advertising industry came up with the concept of the ‘ploughman’s lunch’ in the 1950s in order to sell bread, cheese and pickle in a whole new way, so the country pub with its ‘roaring fire’ and ‘gnarled beams’ became ever more of an English fantasy. Symbolically, it was already a winner; nevertheless, some change was required. This dream pub, like those of George Orwell and the temperance set, had to serve a pie with its pint. Otherwise there was something insufficiently cosy about it – it was too manly, too reminiscent of the days of splintery benches and spit in the sawdust – too real. The notion of a pub as a place where people simply congregated, a social hub that did not need to be named as such because nobody would have doubted it, or even thought about it, all this was evaporating along with the smell of Player’s Navy Cut: it was over, or as near as dammit.
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