On occasion my travel plans have been thwarted. Mostly this is due to a lack of time travel: my top holiday destinations no longer exist.
Some were missed out on by a whisker. Born in 1990 I was too young to travel behind the Iron Curtain; seeing my family in Ostdeutschland and riding around in Onkel Roland’s Wartburg would have been fun, but by the time I got to Chemnitz such cars had been replaced by Volkswagens and the like.
In a bid to experience something akin to the Eastern Bloc I went to North Korea some years ago, irritating my father in the process as I didn’t inform him of my journey. Instead, the first he knew of the jaunt was a postcard that, God knows by what convoluted route, made its way from Pyongyang to Northamptonshire.
Queerly, the hotel I stayed in in Pyongyang had a micro-brewery. Its speciality brew was a viscous, almost opaque beer with the distinct taste of baked beans, almost undrinkable in its awfulness. There was little option to find a bar elsewhere: the police patrolling the perimeter of the hotel would not let you step a foot outside.
Indeed, it’s unlikely that a decent beer can be found in the DPRK. This absence of ale surely ranks high among the country’s flaws. Somehow, I doubt the same could have been said of the East Germans: not even communism could knock their talent for making a good Bier.
Another place I had always wanted to travel to was the now-obliterated Crooked House near Dudley, formerly Britain’s ‘wonkiest pub’. This moniker derived from the fact that it had sunk into the ground on one side due to mining going on underneath, the building being eventually saved by Wolverhampton and Dudley Breweries (who later under the name Marstons, owned it until shortly before its demise).
Having survived 65 years as a farm building and another 80-or-so as a pub, the unfortunate building could not survive longer than a few weeks of being in the hands of developers.
Sold in July, the building completely unsuspiciously caught fire on 5 August, gutting it. Before the embers had cooled, a digger had turned up to raze the structure’s remnants. The fire brigade’s access to the building on the night of the fire was hindered by another unsuspicious mound of earth that blocked access to the pub.
Given that the building was in the process of receiving listed status, its spontaneous combustion is more than a little questionable.
With any luck the developers will be forced to rebuild the place brick-by-brick regardless of the cause. If someone needs to be on site to administer the occasional thrashings to whoever is responsible for this vandalism then I can happily make myself available.
Something within me becomes acutely outraged when a pub is desecrated so. Already decades of ill-government have conspired against the humble public house through punitively taxing everything they sell; added to this has been the scrupulousness of the big pub chains and breweries, tying landlords into expensive and restrictive arrangements.
Yet although people now get lashed up at home instead – supermarkets being leagues cheaper than pubs due to, you guessed it, perverse government taxation that differentiates between ‘on’ and ‘off’ trades – the pub struggles on.
Their continuation, regrettably, has become a matter of survival of the fittest. In an age of massive inflation and spiralling costs, only the most viable of pubs will endure. Those unfashionable in their location or serving a smaller community are likely to face an uphill struggle.
For the many who rely on the pub as a place for socialising, the yearly closure of thousands of pubs represents a threat to their wellbeing. To them the pub is where they go to get out the house. Go to a regional boozer in the afternoon and witness old boys chatting away or reading the paper. It serves a purpose far beyond the beer pulled from the taps.
Few of those in power, however, will regard the pub in such a way: to them it is merely a place to visit of an occasional evening to get drunk. It is readily exchangeable with any old bar. As such, it is one more microcosm displaying the disconnect between the rulers and the ruled, the latter recognising the intrinsic value of places such as pubs, the former seeing them as merely another piece of family silver to be taxed to the hilt or sold off.
Often, we discuss what contribution Britain has made to the world. Noble contenders rear their heads – habeus corpus, constitutional democracy, the Industrial Revolution – but few can compete with the humble pub. Eschewing the gaudiness of the bar and encouraging people out of isolated boozing in their living rooms, it is fertile ground for making human connection. It’s one of the ever-fewer places where you can strike up a conversation without feeling like you’re breaking some new, neurotic social convention.
Undoubtedly this is why they were shut down so readily, along with the rest of society, during Covid. Heaven forbid that people have somewhere to gather and talk their minds. Much better we sit at home, solitary and riven asunder by an ever increasingly partisan world online and on the TV.
With any luck pubs will be around far longer than I will. They managed to outlive the GDR and will, one hopes, outlast the DPRK too.
I’ll do my bit and go to one now.
Another thought provoking article, which needs to finds its way onto bigger sites.
The pub could be undergoing a renaissance, the the same way public gatherings have added so much to policy as well as discourse over the past thousand years or so.
Our village has a single pub, and I don't frequent it often. It has failed multiple times, but now it has attracted a new crowd who seem to be happy turning up not only at weekends or major sporting events on TV, but through the week as well. Just as it functioned in the past century. The pub just might become the start of a new form of government, by re-visiting the way things were done in the past.
As for the developers - call them out. Frauds.
They could have done this destruction above board, but decided to do it in a very amateur way indeed. I wonder what promises were made in the outline planning permission?
I recall in another village the destruction of an 1100 year old tythe barn at 11:00pm on a Friday night, to beat the listing date. As the listing came into force at mid-night, nothing remained - no walls, no listing. That was done by the local and district council, on a vanity project which has now... been flattened. The councillors who did this have now been forgotten.
North Korea, goodness, that was audacious. It is infuriating when the owners, those with a duty of care for a beautiful property, have the "misfortune" to see it destroyed in a terrible accident. I feel the same way when a lovely old tree is felled inspite of a preservation order. And there never seems to be any comeback. I'll confess I have no strong feelings about pubs myself but my husband loved them. Not that he frequented them particularly often, just spending the occasional afternoon quietly supping with his newspaper. We lived in a rural area and our two faves which were within walking distance succombed not long after the 2001 F&M outbreak resulted in some Whitehall mandarin deciding ramblers posed a major threat and making footpaths off limits
A major source of income evaporated and never returned to the same levels. You make a good point that places where people can interact face-to-face will not be loved by HMG. Sounds like a good reason to go. And as my husband would say, "It never rains in a pub."