'Breaking - Britains's Last Pub Has Closed'. Reality one day?

[ANGELFIRE1]

Enlighten us about this Wetherspoon oasis?

 

 

It's doing the rounds in the Penistone area that Wetherspoons are going to be the new owners of the HSBC building on its demise. That should liven Penistone up I would think.

 

Angel1.

[tinfoilhat]

So nothing to do with the price of a pint then?

 

Of a fashion, yes. According to my dad, working men's club were really really cheap but you paid subs to subsidise that. If the old members are pegging out and aren't being replaced and things like energy prices and wages are going up, the price of pint will rise. That's going to look even worse if you can get hammered at home for less than a tenner. According to Ross kemp we are consuming more alchohol than ever before.

[melthebell]

So nothing to do with the price of a pint then?

theres lots of reasons why "some" pubs are closing, price is one of them, but like as been said some pubs are opening.

last time i was down sheff i was shocked to see that new pub on handsworth, built from scratch, sword dancer? yet the turf tavern was shut

[nomoney]

its a generation thing say in the fifties sixties,people did not watch tv every night.they went out with there friends,to pubs and clubs boys met girls and yes girls met boys,now its the internet and dating websites,pubs where i lived did a good business after they where closed, due to steel workers climbing over the wall and going in the back door,now most of the steelworks and factory's are closed and that generation or now pensioners,and cannot afford to buy beer at to-days prices,well not every night and at the weekends.

Can still see it Saturday morning women walking around with head scarves on after having there hair done ready for the night out.

[Jeffrey Shaw]

Britain's last pub is set to close tonight

Try Northern Ireland, then?

[sedith]

George Orwell's essay c1946

 

The Moon Under Water

 

 

My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.

 

Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of ‘regulars’ who occupy the same chair every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer.

 

If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its ‘atmosphere’.

 

To begin with, its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian. It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries, and, on the other hand, no sham roof-beams, ingle-nooks or plastic panels masquerading as oak. The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull’s head over the mantelpiece — everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.

 

In winter there is generally a good fire burning in at least two of the bars, and the Victorian lay-out of the place gives one plenty of elbow-room. There are a public bar, a saloon bar, a ladies’ bar, a bottle-and-jug for those who are too bashful to buy their supper beer publicly, and, upstairs, a dining-room.

 

Games are only played in the public, so that in the other bars you can walk about without constantly ducking to avoid flying darts.

 

In the Moon Under Water it is always quiet enough to talk. The house possesses neither a radio nor a piano, and even on Christmas Eve and such occasions the singing that happens is of a decorous kind.

 

The barmaids know most of their customers by name, and take a personal interest in everyone. They are all middle-aged women—two of them have their hair dyed in quite surprising shades—and they call everyone ‘dear,’ irrespective of age or sex. (‘Dear,’ not ‘Ducky’: pubs where the barmaid calls you ‘ducky’ always have a disagreeable raffish atmosphere.)

 

Unlike most pubs, the Moon Under Water sells tobacco as well as cigarettes, and it also sells aspirins and stamps, and is obliging about letting you use the telephone.

 

You cannot get dinner at the Moon Under Water, but there is always the snack counter where you can get liver-sausage sandwiches, mussels (a speciality of the house), cheese, pickles and those large biscuits with caraway seeds in them which only seem to exist in public-houses.

 

Upstairs, six days a week, you can get a good, solid lunch—for example, a cut off the joint, two vegetables and boiled jam roll—for about three shillings.

 

The special pleasure of this lunch is that you can have draught stout with it. I doubt whether as many as 10 per cent of London pubs serve draught stout, but the Moon Under Water is one of them. It is a soft, creamy sort of stout, and it goes better in a pewter pot.

 

They are particular about their drinking vessels at the Moon Under Water, and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handleless glass. Apart from glass and pewter mugs, they have some of those pleasant strawberry-pink china ones which are now seldom seen in London. China mugs went out about 30 years ago, because most people like their drink to be transparent, but in my opinion beer tastes better out of china.

 

The great surprise of the Moon Under Water is its garden. You go through a narrow passage leading out of the saloon, and find yourself in a fairly large garden with plane trees, under which there are little green tables with iron chairs round them. Up at one end of the garden there are swings and a chute for the children.

 

On summer evenings there are family parties, and you sit under the plane trees having beer or draught cider to the tune of delighted squeals from children going down the chute. The prams with the younger children are parked near the gate.

 

Many as are the virtues of the Moon Under Water, I think that the garden is its best feature, because it allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.

 

And though, strictly speaking, they are only allowed in the garden, the children tend to seep into the pub and even to fetch drinks for their parents. This, I believe, is against the law, but it is a law that deserves to be broken, for it is the puritanical nonsense of excluding children—and therefore, to some extent, women—from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing-shops instead of the family gathering-places that they ought to be.

 

The Moon Under Water is my ideal of what a pub should be—at any rate, in the London area. (The qualities one expects of a country pub are slightly different.)

 

But now is the time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place as the Moon Under Water.

 

That is to say, there may well be a pub of that name, but I don’t know of it, nor do I know any pub with just that combination of qualities.

 

I know pubs where the beer is good but you can’t get meals, others where you can get meals but which are noisy and crowded, and others which are quiet but where the beer is generally sour. As for gardens, offhand I can only think of three London pubs that possess them.

 

But, to be fair, I do know of a few pubs that almost come up to the Moon Under Water. I have mentioned above ten qualities that the perfect pub should have and I know one pub that has eight of them. Even there, however, there is no draught stout, and no china mugs.

 

And if anyone knows of a pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio, I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms.

 

Evening Standard, 9 February 1946

[hyper]

So you think the tradition British boozer has a Rosie future do enlighten me on this ?

I don't profess to know anything about the pub industry, but how are you defining "traditional"?

Traditional could mean sawdust floors, spittoons and pay-as-you-go women on one extreme. More sensibly, I guess you are thinking of the 80's pub with formica furniture, poor hygiene standards, heavy smoking and dominoes.

 

Both these have gone, as they are inappropriate for the times. Where they do exist (except smoking) its cos they are run down, the clientele don't care and just want cheap john Smiths and fosters and there's always a cop car outside ejecting someone.

 

The nearest thing you will find to a traditional pub is the real ale scene and that seems to be an expanding market.

 

In terms of numbers of pubs, then things have changed - little entertainment in days gone past meant a pub on every corner, just as supermarkets mean there is no longer a shop on the opposite corner.

[Andbreathe]

You said closed pub are reopening should be sound could go back to my local Parkway Tavern soon.

 

Tinfoil is right, you really are talking out of your backside. I know of 3 pubs within 3 mins walking distance, which I've been walking to for 30 yrs without hardly a change to any of them.

The thread is a load of old codswallop.

[crookedspire]

What about the back street locals then loads have gone ?

[Fudbeer]

Its true to a degree.

 

The traditional pub has all but disappeared.

 

Many reasons for this the pub co's did not help,old pubs desperately in need of investment charging silly prices for beer certainly did not help.

 

But the main change is in culture.In the past people went out to pubs much more ,"early bar" for instance was a way of life for many people a couple of beers after work was the norm for many.

 

Nowadays a trip to the pub is a special occasion for many maybe once or twice a week and food is often consumed at the same time.

 

Price certainly is a factor with offers you can buy a pint for a little over 50p in the supermarkets so if you are going to pay 5 times that in a pub then it needs to be something special.I bought a pint of regular lager and a bottle of alcohol free for my friend who does not drink and got little change from a tenner last week,to be honest you just feel they are taking the micky sometimes.

 

Many of the more traditional pubs are now frequented by an older generation usually male.

 

On the positive side if you have a well run pub which has a good food offering and is well kept then you can still make it work and real ale pubs are certainly doing well.