Dying pubs.

[dellzeqq]

Well, at the risk of a stoning......I don't miss them. The clientele sit there, nursing their pints, or calling out across the bar in a show of bonhommie. There are gambling machines with insane lights whizzing around. Beer is all right once in a while, but the hourly pilgrimage to a non-too fragrant urinal is less than thrilling. The smell you bring home with you is far, far better than it was in the days when people smoked in bars, but you still have to get out of beery clothes.

So, sorry, but I'm one of those terrible people who goes to bars.

 

[HLaB]

What are the signs of a dying pub ? The a few I deliberately haven't been in but I guess its the bloke standing in the corner with a knife that gives it away ;-)

 

[dodgy]

[QUOTE 1423215"]
not like the soaps would have you believe. That's olden days, and if things hadn't changed then pubs wouldn't be closing. Nowadays there are more specific reasons for pubbing than popping in on the way home from work.
[/quote]


I don't know what you are talking about. I went to the pub last night, I talked with other people, some of whom I didn't know their names. Now I do, ergo I socialised. The people I met now have socialised with me, ergo people do go to the pub and socialise.


Maybe the pubs near you have people staring into their pints and don't talk or something?



I have no idea what you mean by "not like the soaps would have you believe". The soaps have no interest to me, I'm not caught up in some fantasy of bringing soaps to reality.

 

[Globalti]

I suspect that this is true. Remember that pubs flourished when heavy manual work was the norm. Before WW1 and the reform of the licensing laws, beer would be consumed before, during (lunchtime) and after work. It functioned, I suspect, as a mild anaesthetic and eased the pain of being not much more than an industrial slave.

I used to work at a company in Walthamstow that had a subsidised bar on the premises, at lunch times it was always packed with factory and office workers enjoying a pint or three. People use to go back and operate machinery or fall asleep at their desks. The company doesn't exist any more.

Walk back just one street off the Front in Blackpool and you will find several massive Victorian public toilets, huge buildings containing hundreds of urinals. It's then that you realise that the fortunes of resorts like Blackpool depended on the mass conversion of beer into urine by the thousands of factory workers who thronged there by special trains from the mill towns.

 

[Globalti]

Maybe the pubs near you have people staring into their pints and don't talk or something?

If it's the South of England they are probably staring at the glass of sticky warm stuff for which they've just paid £5.00 and thinking "Feck me, why did I buy this?"

 

[threebikesmcginty]

If it's the South of England they are probably staring at the glass of sticky warm stuff for which they've just paid £5.00

You're probably looking at a Boddingtons creamflow then as you're ooop north.

 

[Yellow Fang]

Starbucks seem to have no trouble selling something for £2.50 which would probably cost less than 20p to drink at home. Perhaps there's a lesson for the pubs there?

That is a good point. I quite like going to coffee shops, though not Starbucks particularly. At the weekend, it is actually quite difficult to find one that isn't crammed. Sometimes I go to one in the morning, pay £1-85 for an americano, read my book for 15 mins then leave. I feel a bit guilty if I stay too long. Thinking about it, paying £3 for a decent pint in a pub is not such bad value in comparison. However, pubs are for socialising, so it's a little tricky reading books or papers in them. I do actually read my book in one pub, but that's a sort of intellectual pub and I only read my book there Saturday early in the afternoon when it's dead.
There's a bar at a hotel I sometimes go to, which serves coffee and alcohol, and has a big TV screen for football. The coffee costs about £1-80 for a small cup, while a pint costs about £3-20. I sometimes have both. The same hotel also has a sort of luxury coffee shop that works out of it. It sells very creamy coffee for an eye-watering £3-00. Although it's a bigger cup of coffee, I still felt it was too much.

 

[slowmotion]

[QUOTE 1423206"]
It was like that at The Ship.


Hence we went!

(Very hooray henry/henriettia crowd)





[/quote]


Sorry, my mistake. There is a pub a few hundred yards upstream from the Dove called The Old Ship. Same side of the River. There is another Ship up by Chiswick Bridge.

 

[Yellow Fang]

I suspect that this is true. Remember that pubs flourished when heavy manual work was the norm. Before WW1 and the reform of the licensing laws, beer would be consumed before, during (lunchtime) and after work. It functioned, I suspect, as a mild anaesthetic and eased the pain of being not much more than an industrial slave.

Slightly OT, but the author of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was discussing drinking in pubs via his alter ego in the book. The book was based about 1910. There was quite a large, mainly middle class movement that condemned drinking, saying it a waste of money and blaming it for society's ills. He made the point that why shouldn't working people spend some of their money on enjoying themselves. They worked for it. People who didn't work as hard often had more money to spend on themselves. Workers didn't generally drink money they should be spending on their families, and those who did were held in contempt. Work sounded hard back then: long hours, poor pay, no job security and foremen who kept you hard at it all day. There was no social security, so when there was no work, you were destitute.

 

[dodgy]

[QUOTE 1423238"]
I think you're confusing people socialising when they're in the pub and people going to the pub to socialise. It's the latter which has dropped right off.
[/quote]


AGain, you're still not making sense to me. I go to the pub to socialise, if I wanted to drink on my own I would (and probably most others would) stay at home.

 

[Dan B]

. However, pubs are for socialising, so it's a little tricky reading books or papers in them.

Take your point, but maybe we (or at least, landlords) need to get over that mindset and start accommodating people who want to read or browse the web or whatever as well as those who routinely engage strangers in conversation in their pubs. I have on occasion dropped into my "local" to read the paper or use a laptop while waiting for friends to turn up and didn't feel I was getting disapproving looks, but then the staff know me quite well there already.

 

[Alan Whicker]

Globalti


That pub by the cemetery is the Birkbeck Tavern, which is (or was) in the good beer guide. We used to drink there when we first move to Leytonstonia. It's not a bad pub, very friendly with a great garden, but the quality of beer is very variable. Also, the streets around it are a bit ... depressing. Leytonstone's improved a lot in the eight years since we got here ... but the bit between Cathall Road and Leyton Tube seems to actually have got worse. The North Star is the same distance from our house, and a much more cheerful walk

The Red Lion in Leytonstone proper is reopening next week (link). If it's as good as Antic's other pubs it'll be excellent.

 

[Globalti]

I used to live in No. 158, which was next to the cemetery florist opposite the pub. I was out tinkering with my motorbike one day and some bloke had parked a brand new beige coloured Ford Sierra, one of the first I'd ever seen. Suddenly three blokes came piling out of the Birkbeck, one carrying a baseball bat, with which he proceeded to smash all the windows of the Sierra, while shouting "Like yer new car, do ya?" at the other bloke. I kept my head down and pretended I hadn't seen anything. Like I said, it wasn't a very nice pub in the early 80s.

Is the North Star run by an Irish couple called Jim and Bridie? Probably not, they were my landlords.

 

[Alan Whicker]

Oh - can't imagine that now! Not sure about the immediate area though

Jim and Bridie? I don't know - but the people who run it now may be their kids. The family are supposed to have run the pub for decades. They also run the Bell on Leytonstone High Road, which is great but 'lagery' - very "East End" (in a good way).

 

[Adasta]

[QUOTE 1423240"]
The soaps are an illustration of what it used to be like, and the only reason they haven't kept up is that they have to have a focal point to survive. And writing that does make one wonder what the impact of the withering of the community meeting point is doing to society.
[/quote]

I think you're right. I wonder to what extent generational difference and the disparity of the "thinking" between them causes this decline?

I would never go to a pub alone. Nor would any of my friends. Unless the pub is a pre-arranged meeting point, it just seems seedy to go to a pub to look to socialise. I generally find that I can't spend too long in pubs because they depress me. I'm very aware of being surrounded by alocoholics. Of course, there are also people there just having lunch and a couple of beers with friends, but it's the notion of the pub being a "second home" that rankles. Red-nosed "old boys" talking about their glory days sadden me and that's not the feeling I want to experience while I'm out with friends; however, it is the prevailing feeling I get when I'm in a pub for a long time.

With regards to the pub not being a central point of the community: well, good. I don't want it to be. I don't want pubs to go out of business either, but I certainly don't want the centre of my community to be a boozer.