Bruce Masters visits 45,000th British pub

In the kind of pub crawl even students would baulk at, the 66-year-old covered an estimated million miles since he started visiting watering holes in 1960, sipping his way through 25,000 pints of local-brewed ale in the process.

His latest stop was at the Hole In The Wall pub, in Portsmouth – but he doesn’t plan to call time just yet.

Mr Masters, who travels everywhere by train, said: ‘There are still a great many pubs I have not been to. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing properly.’

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Gale Force at Swiss Cottage

Wordsmith that I aspire to be, I savour the shipping forecast, delight in spelling my surname with the phonetic alphabet and take pleasure in ticking off exciting sounding stops on the London underground. Pubs intrigue me too – but not just for their promise of cosy booze. Behind the quirky often olde English names are yards of yarns…

Rather than text, many originally wore symbols as signs to lure within the thirsty illiterate. Unsurprisingly for a kingdom, ‘The Crown’ is among the UK’s most popular names, as is the expression of arable honesty, ‘The Plough’. And many innings of ‘Cricketers’ overlook village greens as picturesque and seemingly serene as a Midsomer Murders’ set. Considering we invented the locomotive, ‘The Railway’ is also much in evidence fringing silvery rails shivering with sweaty commuters.

In a more racy thread, Cornwall’s low beamed ‘Bucket of Blood’ allegedly recalls the murder by smugglers of a customs official whose spent corpse was hastily discarded down a well. When drawn by an unsuspecting landlord, the pail proved the colour of crimson.

Although ‘the greatest advantage in gambling lies in not playing at all’ (Gerolamo Cardano), gambling has long been fuelled by booze. Balls Pond Road in Islington may well have been named after an establishment run by one John Ball who charged customers to take a shot at fowl floating in a pond at the back of his pub.

Away from terra firma, Birmingham’s Man in the Moon was renamed The Man on the Moon on the day of the first moon landing (20 July, 1969). And rather than Leicester Square’s crowded Wetherspoon’s with wi-fi, George Orwell used his last Evening Standard column to issue a love letter to his fantasy of the ideal London watering hole.

‘The Moon Under Water’ should eschew ‘plastic panels masquerading as oak’ for ‘uncompromisingly Victorian’ fittings and architecture, while the hair of two middle-aged barmaids must be dyed ‘in quite surprising shades.’ And a near secret garden would unravel at the end of a narrow passage. He penned: ‘you find yourself in a fairly large garden with plane trees, under which there are little green tables with iron chairs…’

Incidentally, J.D. Wetherspoon’s 6’6″ mullet laden founder, Tim Randall Martin named his brand after a teacher at one of the eleven schools he attended, after reputedly being deemed a lost cause academically. “He was the least likely person to control a pub because he could not control a class,” said the literal publican giant to the Independent. Regardless of education speculation, from a micro pub in a former betting shop in the late 1970s, Martin’s vision now encompasses over 800 counters.

Other pubs are named after food, such as Southsea’s ‘Sir Loin of Beef’, physical support of the legend that a protein cut was rendered protagonist when knighted. And Manchester’s ‘Oxnoble’ recalls a variety of potato particularly popular in Georgian times.

The various instances of ‘Black Boy Inn’, from North Wales to Berkshire now receive complaints for obvious reasons despite probably being named after blacksmiths, while, finally on this brief dip into the cask of rumour and reality, which could evolve into a book, The Cock and Bull is a play on the cock and bull story. The story goes that intense rivalry between clienteles of both Cock and Bull pubs yards apart in Stony Stratford led to increasingly enormous exaggeration…

Douglas Blyde.


 

If we don’t act now, pubs will disappear

A piece written for The Times By Charlie McVeigh, founder of The Draft House

The pub is broken. The trajectory of its long-term decline got steeper yesterday and there is no help at hand. Punch Taverns announced that 1,300 of its 6,700-strong estate have “no future” and will be closed or sold. We are used to hearing that 50-odd pubs a week are disappearing, but if the closures are accelerating soon whole areas of the UK may lose access to draught beer and a community gathering place.

What has gone so horribly wrong? Why are our pubs, once the mainstay of the urban street corner and heart of every village, no longer viable? The death of some is inevitable. Noone is going to suggest that we suspend the drink-driving laws which have killed off any inn unfortunate enough to be situated on an A Road roundabout (‘one for the road, anyone?’). But what of the rest? Why is the pub dying?

The pricing model is broken – supermarket booze is too cheap. The supermarkets routinely use beer as a “traffic driver”, selling it below cost price to draw in customers for their weekly shop. Asda was recently selling 20 tins of Stella Artois for £9 (hope your fridge is big enough). And a price war in 2007 saw own-branded beer for sale for as little as 22p a tin – David Cameron’s much-quoted “20 tins for a fiver”. Leaving aside the appalling social and health impact of unsupervised drinking at these prices, how can the hard-pressed pub-goer justify £2.50 or more per pint against this backdrop?

The regulatory environment is broken. The smoking ban has alienated many customers. Hard-pressed independent landlords (surely the future of the industry) are swamped by bureaucracy and box-ticking unmanageable for a small business without access to an HR department. Last week yet another set of new rules, passed by the last government, came into effect stipulating that all pubs must offer wine by the 125ml measure – by law. This means new menus and glassware for a measure that research shows nobody wants.

The pub ownership model is broken. Brimming with free market zeal the Tories forced the breweries to sell off their pubs in the 1980s. The dogma of the day said it was anti-competitive that pub tenants had to buy beer exclusively from their brewery owners. Fuelled by oceans of debt (Punch Taverns, for example, owes more than £3 billion, or £464,000 per pub) smart City types formed the ‘PubCos’ which acquired these estates. But the insanity is that the ‘tie’ which obliges the tenant to buy beer from its landlord, remained in place in the majority of instances. So now most pubs are not only paying large rents, but also have to buy their beer at grossly inflated prices from their landlord, prices which if charged by a supermarket would cause a customer to shop elsewhere.

Pubs themselves are broken. Challenges arising from supermarket pricing, regulation and punitive leases all have a cost. And that cost is a poor selection of the cheapest brands of beer, ‘ready’ meals, poorly trained staff and management, delayed refurbishment, increasingly desperate price promotions and so on. In other words, a disheartening experience for the customer creating a spiral of decline, leading sooner or later to yet another closure statistic.

Pub owners and staff up and down the country, if they have got this far, will be cursing me for the calumny I heaped upon the industry in the last paragraph. And of course there are many honourable exceptions. Prosperous metropolitan and suburban areas still support a thriving, well-run, increasingly food-led pub trade. Pubs are not closing in these areas. I know from bitter experience how difficult it is to buy licensed sites in Notting Hill, Mayfair or Islington.

But we are talking about pubs in non-thriving areas, i.e. much of the country outside the prosperous South East. What’s the recipe for revival? This is a crisis, and emergency measures must be taken.

Government has a big part to play, loath though I am to admit it. Nowhere is the bonfire of regulation more needed than in our trade. Tax on draught beer should be slashed and a minimum price for alcohol set – Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy asked for this himself this year. Business rates must be reduced (ours were up by as much as 25% this year).

The hardest nut to crack will be reform of pub ownership. But crack it we must and brighter minds than mine must help. The high rents and tied leases set by PubCos must be stopped. Currently the PubCos cannot change lease terms because of loan covenants. With heavy debts and fewer customers it is in their interests to find a better way to do business. The government may have to step in too, they own the banks after all. The goal must be to make pub ownership and attendance affordable for everyone, everywhere in Britain.

www.drafthouse.co.uk