A closed pub is a sad, sad sight. Where once was life, people talking and laughing, now there is none. OK, bad stuff would have gone on too. I get that. Every pub has a drinker or two who needs the drink they’re holding more than they should. These places are, after all, potential vectors for dependence on a highly addictive substance, with all the misery that entails. But I think – hope – that pubs do more good than harm, that they’re more of a blessing than a curse.
Like most drinkers, I’m inclined to imagine that most of the population drink about the same as me, if not more, and in similar places. When the first lockdown was announced, including, unthinkably, the closing of pubs, Boris Johnson said he found it wrenching to be “taking away the ancient, inalienable right of free-born people of the United Kingdom to go to the pub”. I happened to watch him make that speech on a TV in my local pub – it was my birthday. I’m sure I nodded in agreement, though even then I thought it was a bit of a stretch to make the right to go to the pub sound like it was enshrined in Magna Carta. And when I checked, I found that only about half of adults regularly frequent pubs and bars. So not everyone, by a long shot, exercises their inalienable right, although that leaves no small number who do.
The lights have been going out in pubs for a good while now. Go back 40 years and there were more than 60,000 pubs in the UK. At that time, unhappily for me, I knew of only one that would serve me. I wasn’t yet 18, you see, and I couldn’t pass for 18 either. Now, being 57, I can generally get served but there are at least 20,000 fewer pubs to choose from. How’s my luck?
These are the pubs that have gone for ever, each of them significant in the lives of numbers unknown. But something almost as bad as final closure is starting to happen – pubs closing before closing time, or not opening at all early in the week. Lockdown changed everything. Before then, while most pubs couldn’t stay open after 11pm, there seemed to be an unwritten rule that neither were they allowed to close before 11pm. Now they seem to feel they can close when they please, often for the entirely logical reason that there’s next to no one in there. But it sends a chill down my spine, for it feels like the first portent that the pub’s end is nigh.
While a dark pub is always a miserable sight, in towns and cities there will be somewhere else to go. There will be a light on somewhere. In rural areas, where this isn’t the case, a dark pub feels so much darker. In the village where I spend a lot of my time, between now and Christmas the pub stays closed for the first half of the week. I don’t blame the landlord; I know the business is getting tougher all the time. But if this pub is closed, there’s no public place for people to commune within at least five miles. Yes, there might be people meeting to do yoga, talk about books, play pickleball or whatever, and that’s great. But there’s nowhere visible, nowhere anyone can wander into.
It’s not that I’m always in this pub, honestly. But I’m happier when it’s open, whether I’m there or not. Even if I’m just sitting quietly at home, I’m comforted by the thought that just around the corner there’s a public place with its lights and a few people sitting around chatting, or just staring into space. It’s a sign of life.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist