A constant, melancholic refrain of modern life is that pubs are in decline and under threat. Hilaire Belloc was bemoaning this nearly a century ago: ‘When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.’ Cheap supermarket booze is blamed, and young people ‘pre-loading’ at home or in the park on bargain vodkapops before staggering to the club. Or perhaps, as Stephen Williams, former Lib Dem minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government, put it, because traditionally white working-class areas have become home to teetotal Muslim immigrants. Blackburn has lost more pubs than any other British town.
But, at the risk of harsh judgement, it may be that it’s just bad pubs that are dying out. At either end of my mum and dad’s street two pubs have been steel-shuttered and security-taped for months. But then they were perhaps the two worst pubs I have ever been in; desolate and nasty, serving indifferent food and tasteless beer. By contrast, none of my favourite pubs seems in any imminent decline, town or country. There’s always a queue for the bar in the Port Street Beer House and The Briton’s, and on a Bank Holiday Monday you’ll need to book a table at the Boot & Shoe in Greystoke near Ullswater, a village pub with the buzzy feel of a town centre one, and not a tankard in sight.
You can get quietly or noisily leathered in these places (providing you behave), but a good pub provides much more than that and, traditionalists take note, this wasn’t always the case. The pubs of my childhood were cheerless places, from what I could glimpse through the little hatch of the off-sales window. Places where a dartboard or a one-armed bandit represented state of the art recreation. The Briton’s offers the occasional storytelling session, quiz nights and folk clubs. The Boot & Shoe hosts a local MP’s surgery from time to time. The Port Street Beer House has ethnic street food cooked out back on summer nights, sizzling chilli dogs and samosas and barbecue. They have ‘meet the brewer’ evenings too, where visiting micro-brewers from Milwaukee and Bruges are treated like rock stars.
An English pub is very different from an American bar or a German bierkeller or a French wine bar. That difference, though, can be as nebulous and unfathomable to foreign guests as our plurals and past tenses. It is an invention of the British people that reflects our national character. Learning the etiquette of pubs is a great social leveller. We all must learn that the note held unshowily but prominently in the hand will alert the hawk-eyed bar staff member as to your place in the serving order. Waving it about, however, will indicate that you are an over-entitled arse. Some of us learn quickly that the occasional ‘one for yourself’ will get you remembered favourably for a future visit for the modest outlay of about 50p. We learn the complicated protocols of ‘splitting a round’ and ‘doubling up’, and when and where it is OK to slip into that gap at the bar during a last orders scrum.
‘Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name’ went the theme tune to long-running comedy Cheers. I’ve been in the bar that inspired it, the Bull & Finch in Boston, and no one knew my name, but I liked it no less for that. Sometimes the very fact that people don’t know you from Adam is the reason you go the pub. It could be to escape, to start again or maybe just to sit undisturbed with your book or paper. But of course, having a ‘local’ is something that at heart every Englishman and woman feels contented with, even if it’s just a place that you know and feel comfortable with, rather than expect a slapped back and a ‘the usual?’.
Finishing a Cumbrian walk once, some friends and I arrived at the Boot & Shoe at about half-three to find, not unreasonably, the chef gone home and the kitchen shut. Apologetically, Jan the landlady went away and returned to place on our table a huge, teetering cairn of assorted crisps, a jar of chutney and a pile of buttered white bread, for us to make crisp sandwiches while we warmed up and sipped our ale and whisky. A Michelin star would not have made that late afternoon lunch any more delightful.
We have exported the notion of the pub to the world, and the world has embraced it. Their take is different naturally, speaking of charm, exoticism and quirkiness, of boho intimacy and even cool, in a way that might make habitués of the traditional English boozer choke into their chestnut mild. It began with the American crush on the faux-Irish pub, later to blarney its way round the globe. When Woody Allen should have been picking up an Oscar for Annie Hall, he was playing the clarinet in Michael’s Pub in New York as he did every Monday night. Maybe they kept a really good stout. But in this act, Allen was really saying, ‘Hey, I’m just a regular guy who has no truck with the weird shallowness of Tinseltown’ (and back in the days when we might have believed him). Soon the world had developed ‘a craic habit’ with a couple of thousand cod-’Oirish watering holes in some 50 countries.
But recognisably urban English pubs have insinuated themselves into other shores too. China has a blossoming pub culture, a fact that was brought home to me when a friend texted to say that he was playing darts and dominoes and drinking bitter in a ‘pub’ in Guangzhou province. The government of the People’s Republic have tacitly encouraged this, launching campaigns to encourage the consumption of grape wine and beer rather than traditional stronger grain-based spirits and rice wines. A recent feature in the Financial Times supplement, nestling between Lucia Van der Post’s luxury jewellery reviews and an ad for a yacht charter, was a guide to the pubs of Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, where the subcontinent’s new young software millionaires and super geeks sip pale ale at Formica tables à la the Rovers Return.
I pitched up one night at sunset in Van Buren, Indiana, a quaint and sleepy one-horse town in the middle of the real America, the grain belt of the Midwest. Hungry and thirsty, I found in the middle of town not a bar, but a dark, woody pub that would not have seemed out of place in Bolton or Keighley. It served mild and about a 150 different baked potato fillings. It was run by a guy called Jack Sparks who asked me where I was from, and when I said ‘Wigan’ pinned a drawing pin in a map of the world in that bit of central Lancashire and told me with pride that he wanted this to be ‘the kind of public house you get back in your part of the world’. It was called the Other Place and it got its name, Jack told me, from being across the street from a much more conventional American bar where everyone walked in and asked, ‘Is this the place that serves those potatoes?’
When Jack says ‘in my part of the world’ is he thinking of England or the north? Is there something uniquely northern about a northern pub? I would say not in terms of fixtures or fittings, snacks or décor but maybe in terms of culture. I’ve never seen anyone order a lager top in a northern pub and I don’t think I’ve seen anyone drinking Mild south of Milton Keynes. The notion of the after work drink and the happy hour I tend to associate with London. The more grimy, manual nature of northern industry dictated that workers would go home and get cleaned up before venturing out again. I was amazed when I first saw how London pubs, especially in the Square Mile, would often clear out by nine o clock and wouldn’t open at all at weekends which seemed some vague crime against nature to me.
Oddly, given the north’s enthusiasm for pubs (or maybe because of it), the temperance movement began here in Preston in 1832. The Chartists worked a radical riff on this, trying to move it away from its catholic basis into what they called ‘temperance Chartism’ and seeing the quest for working-class sobriety going hand in hand with the demand for workers’ voting rights. Temperance bars were once widespread across the north with one on most high streets. Now only one remains, Fitzpatrick’s of Rawtenstall, serving sarsaparilla and dandelion & burdock, blackbeer and raisin, ginger cordial, cream soda, lemon & ginger and blood tonic.
One of the most popular soft drinks in the world was invented as a direct response to the burgeoning temperance movement. In 1908, in Granby Row in downtown Manchester, John Nichols created a new health cordial called Vim Tonic and it soon became a hit in the region’s temperance bars. The name soon became shortened to Vimto, and it is still with us and thriving. In fact, I went to its hundredth birthday
party in a fashionable Manchester bar and met the current Nichols family, who still run the company.
Mr Nichols told me that the drink is hugely popular in the Arab world, especially at Ramadan, when it is regarded as a smart and gluggable after-sunset tipple. In deference to the brand’s popularity with kids and its roots in the temperance movement, the Nichols’ have decided that there will never be an ‘alcopops’ version of Vimto (though of course something very like that can be made by combining it with port and blue WKD; the infamous ‘Cheeky Vimto’). But the company had no problem with and indeed encouraged Vimto’s use as a mixer. At the centenary party I went to, a mixologist bartender was serving up delicious Vimto cocktails. It was the tail end of a blazingly hot working day in the city and my friend John and I plumped for a long cool drink with lots of ice cold vodka, a dash of Aperol, Vimto, mint and crushed ice. I can still taste it. After the first sip, John turned to me at the bar and said, ‘Hmm, it’s OK, but I don’t think I could have more than seven or eight.’
The pub no longer has the virtual monopoly on working-class leisure that it once did, but as that boozy gang the Institute of Economic Affairs said in a report of December 2014, ‘Pessimism about the British pub trade has a long history’. Mass Observation, that earnest, leftist chronicler of British life, was mourning its decline in the 1930s. Orwell, in a 1943 review of The Pub and the People, thought that the passive pleasures of cinema and radio were luring people away from the communality and ‘animated conversations’ of the pub. Equally gloomy, Christopher Hutt wrote a book called The Death of the English Pub in 1973. Around the same time, a TV ad sponsored by the pub trade featured England captain Bobby Moore and his missus popping in to a pub and encouraging us to ‘look in at the local’, in an attempt to lose the pub’s image as a bastion of brutish sullen masculinity.
But temperance be damned. Up here we like a drink. Not for us the January detox and the feeble infantilised refusal to booze on a school night. In the north-east, during the early eighties, a health campaign was launched to curb binge drinking with the slogan ‘two or three pints, two or three times a week’. Among Geordie drinking wits, this was soon turned into the mantra ‘two or three pints, two or three times a night’. This is simply outrageous, of course, and in our defence all I can say is that we don’t like being told what to do, which is why sales of Turkey Twizzlers increased in the north in the weeks after Jamie Oliver’s tearful TV tirade against them.
When the BBC opened MediaCity, the brand new purpose built multi-million pound state-of-the-art home of the BBC in the north of England, we all agreed that, rather like the amorous sailors in South Pacific bemoaning the lack of Dames, we had pizza restaurants and cinemas, we had libraries and trams, we had museums and galleries and five-a-side and theatres, but what didn’t we have: we didn’t have a pub. Then, a year or so ago, one opened just next to my radio studio. On hot summer afternoons, as I slave at a microphone, I watch as laughing punters sip ice-cold craft beer or read books over a glass of something fruity and full-bodied. It’s hell but I don’t blame them.
MediaCity has risen, neon-lit and glamorous, from the old Salford docks. Built by the Manchester Ship Canal Company, the docks were opened in 1894 by Queen Victoria, and at their peak they were the third busiest port in the land. Containerisation did for it though, that and restrictions on the craft that could navigate the ship canal. All through the seventies, the docks dwindled and declined, rusted and silted. It closed in 1982 with the loss of 3,000 jobs, coincidentally about the same number that were created when the BBC moved in here in the noughties.
That move prompted much consternation in the London press. A series of blustering op ed pieces boiled down to dopey screeds of barely-concealed contempt and suspicion, with straplines like ‘Auntie’s Folly’ and ‘Bill Turnbull Fears For His Life Every Time He Parks Car Say Friends’. Fleet Street sniggered at the north’s evident unsuitability for anything cultural and, on a more personal level, bemoaned the fact that they had to come all the way on a comfortable train to Manchester to appear on BBC Breakfast plugging their new book. Here’s an example from Giles Coren:
All sorts of shows that needed no messing about with – BBC Breakfast, Richard Bacon’s Radio 5 Live show, Match of the Day – have been randomly booted up there … at a cost of what I’m told was around a billion pounds.
When you get here, it is very like High Noon: wide, empty streets, vacated lots, haunted-looking gunslingers, tumbleweed. A few weeks ago a mate of mine got home to London two hours late because someone was shot dead literally outside the door of his studio.
And so I am torn between love and duty, as I was last week when, in order to talk about my book on BBC Breakfast, I had to go up the night before, and miss the company of my wife and daughter for 24 hours, because there are no trains early enough from London to travel there on the day …
So I was forging a path into the Wild (North) West. Opening a trail. One man against the wilderness. Well, one man and his publicist … from Hodder, whose job it is to shanghai me into these trips.
In my first high fever of rage at these bleatings, I wrote a piece for the New Statesman in which I fulminated that it was hard to pinpoint what was so dreadful about this. Was it the tired clichés and untruths about trains and shootings? Was it the laziness of the prose, just the general unctuous metropolitan bellyaching? Whatever, I concluded that surely any reasonable person would think that every penny of the whole billion pound MediaCity site was a bargain, even if its sole purpose was to screw up Giles’s day.
I’ve calmed down a little now. Salford is definitely no St John’s Wood. That’s why we like it. But maybe I have got that St John’s Wood cabal wrong. Maybe their shtick is an affectation, a turn done to please their readers, a bit of easy posturing. Lord knows, we can all be guilty of that. Maybe I have done them a disservice in casting them as over-privileged babies surfing waves of conceit and entitlement. Perhaps, in the same way they have me cast as a chippy left-wing northerner with a grudge, a 2:1 and a romanticised view of council estates, chip shops and class struggle. They may be right and I may be wrong about them, so away with such acrimony. Let’s play nice and let’s ‘accentuate the positive’, as the self-help books would have it. I work at MediaCity practically every day and I love it. I love the light and the water, the facilities, the campus-like feel of the place. I love the fact that at night it feels like Blade Runner, like Tokyo. It excites the child in me just like those fairground lights and floodlight did and still do.
And in the day, from my desk, I can see over Eccles and suburban Worsley, along the M61, over Atherton and Tyldesley, ‘Bent’ and ‘Bongs’ as their weird local names have them. I can see the shapely whaleback Winter Hill. Sometimes anyway. Some days it’s buried in clag and wreathed in rain, but some days it wobbles through a summer haze or sparkles in early winter light, and it calls me. I can’t see lonely Anglezarke Moor and its flashes of water. But that calls me too. It’s waiting, and it knows I’ll be back.
When I was thinking about how to end this book, I was determined not to descend into soft soap and blather. The north and its people deserve better than gloopy sentiment, even though we are a hopelessly sentimental lot. I’d written one love letter to the north and I couldn’t simply write another now, the same roads taken but at a somewhat more arthritic pace. But two things happened.
Firstly a general election hoved into view, and as the talk revolved around sops for big business, and inheritance giveaways for millionaires, and benefit cuts, and library closures, and the paring away at every turn of what makes us fair and civilised, I realised that some things can bear endless repeating. The view from Blackpool Tower and the Humber Bridge, the moors of Anglezarke and Rookhope, from Catbells and Werneth Low, the terraces at Rochdale FC and even the glamorous balconies of MediaCity, Salford, are different from the view from Primrose or Harrow hills. You can’t see us at all from there it seems. So we shall have to remind them that we are here.
It was o
nce taken for granted that any creative type – writer, musician, actor, comedian etc – would, however proudly northern they were, have to at some point decamp to London. Braine, Barstow, Storey, Delaney and all the burgeoning giants of the Kitchen Sink school, made the trip eventually and the northern writer eating tripe in St John’s Wood (metaphorically and literally) became a comic trope like Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen. They may have celebrated the north’s passion, quick wittedness, humour, virility and such but they also railed against its small mindedness and lack of sophistication. Success lay in getting away and it lay southward.
That is no longer the case. Writers of my acquaintance who quit the towns and cities of their northern birth out of necessity for careers in London now watch ruefully as their university-aged kids apply hopefully for places in Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle and Manchester lured by affordable and convenient lives in cool, vibrant communities.
In 2014, the radio station BBC 6 Music held a festival in Newcastle and Gateshead; we decamped en masse, presenters and producers and management, to the banks of the Tyne for the weekend. I think Newcastle is the best-looking city in Britain; in fact, just one of the best generally, full of character and beauty and wonderful people. I never miss a chance to go there, so I was off like a shot, through the wild and empty country where Hadrian’s legions once stomped, and eventually into Newcastle; the finest train arrival of any city in England, except maybe Durham, just down the road.
I strolled one evening at sunset with my colleagues, after a great day of events in the arty quarter around Ouseburn, along the banks of the river back to the beautiful Sage centre, a curvaceous, chrome poem high on the Gateshead side of the water. We walked past luxury hotels, penthouse flats and little market stalls, looking down that broad and beautiful waterway at the famous bridges, each lovely in its own way – the Millennium Bridge sleek and modern; the Tyne Bridge mighty and dark, like something from Gotham; the Swing, bright and quirky and fun.
The Pie At Night: In Search of the North at Play Page 37
