Micropubs

My beloved and I rarely drink in pubs these days, certainly we don't use any local pubs regularly. Easter weekend we went to the Prince of Wales in Foxfield for a wonderful pint of real ale and an hour in a traditional, cosy pub environment. Yes, I'd rather drive 35 miles for one decent pint, in a real pub than walk five minutes to my local pubs.

Until recently I blamed the smoking ban and cheap supermarket drink for the closure of pubs, but there's another reason. Too many pubs are crap. Landlords/pub companies need to take a good hard look at what they provide, it's not good in the overwhelming majority of cases, and when they blame smoking and supermarkets for pub closures they are being lazy.

Carnforth, with a population of nearly 6,000 doesn't have a single pub in the current CAMRA Real Ale Guide. There are three pubs we wouldn't step foot in. You walk in and your ears are assaulted by noise from gaming machines, loud jukeboxes or commentary from the football game on the giant screens, often simultaneously.

There was another pub that we would occasionally use if we wanted to eat, but their food is now so expensive we don't bother any more. Would you pay nearly £10 for burger and chips in a pub? And the design is such, most tables laid for food, that you don't feel comfortable just having a drink and no food. We used to occasionally sit in the lounge bar of a local hotel, but a TV screen has gone up in there now showing non-stop pop videos. So we stay in or have a special trip to a real pub a few miles away.

I liken pub closures to church closures. They change and attendances drop. But instead of looking at the changes being the reason for the fall in use they decide to modernise a little more. Attendances drop again, so they modernise a bit more. And so it goes, then they start closing.

But in the last few years a revolution has begun. Perhaps 'revolution' is not quite the word, it's more a 'rebirth'. I first came across this development in a newspaper article a couple of months ago, I read about micropubs. Micropubs are small, intimate places that sell good quality real ale, mostly from the growing number of microbreweries around the UK. They also sell quality cider, wine and soft drinks. No spirits, no strong German lager and certainly no 'shots'.

No booming music, no huge TV screens and no gaming machines. But there is a collection of traditional games, maybe chess, backgammon, dominoes, darts and cards. Newspapers and magazines to read, maybe a few books to borrow or a good beer guide to leaf through and conversation. One micropub even makes customers pay into a charity pot if your mobile rings.

They are what pubs used to be and they seem to be bucking the trend and actually booming while so many other pubs are closing. Currently I'm aware of The Butchers Arms, The Just Reproach, The Bake and Alehouse, The Conqueror in Kent, The Rat Race Alehouse in Hartlepool and Just Beer Micropub in Newark. Thankfully I'm aware of several more due to open during this year.

 I've visited The Rat Race and Just Beer and they are everything they claim to be. Cosy, friendly and serving some of the finest ale I've sampled. I can't wait to do a tour of the Kent micropubs, especially The Butchers Arms, the original micropub and the smallest pub in the UK .

Until there's a micropub less than a hundred miles away I'll just have to envy the lucky drinkers who have a local micropub and trust to my CAMRA Good Beer Guide.

The Modern World

I saw a thing about Sir Norman Foster on breakfast news this morning. If you don't know he's the architect of such things as The Gherkin in London and the renovated Reichstag in Berlin. Of no consequence whatsoever but he was born around the corner from where I was born, but about 25 years before me. He was born in Reddish, Stockport, I was born in Gorton, Manchester. There any similartities end.

What I find depressing when I hear Norman Foster interviewed, and looking at his website, is how he rattles on about how the built environment adds to our quality of life, then builds with totally cold, characterless and aesthetically unpleasing glass and steel. His interiors all look like huge shopping malls, fine for shopping malls but impersonal and lacking any warmth for offices and public buildings.

Architects like Foster are turning the world into a bland, characterless glass and steel theme park where you don't know which city in which continent you are in. Do you know whare the building above is? Do you know what continent it's in even? Is it a public car park? Is it a shopping mall? Is it an office block?

Driving across Europe today you ee the same huge retail parks and business parks whether in Prague, Manchester or anywhere else. The detested yellow and blue monstrosities that are Ikea buildings always get my blood boiling. At least the Poles, the Belgians and others faithfully rebult their old towns after being destroyed in wars. In England we waited until after the wars to destroy what the Germans hadn't. That destruction, like some kind of cultural cleansing, continues today in cities like Liverpool and Manchester where swathes of traditional brick built terraced houses are being bulldozed to be replaced by characterless hutches.

I've rambled on before about the death of the traditional pub. Now our traditional markets are dying. All over the North of England market stalls lie empty. A vicious circle, people don't use the markets so traders give up. A half empty market stops people visiting the market and so on and so on. If people don't want markets any more fine, but what has happened to kill all but the biggest and most attractive markets such as Bury market? The answer is the supermakets and shopping malls.

Manchester City Council proved their stupidity by giving Tesco planning permission for a huge hypermarket in Gorton, on condition that a market is built. So you have Tesco, selling everyting from fruit and veg to DVDs, computers and clothes, and right next door a market with sky high rents, and empty stalls.

Bury market is superbly marketted as a regional market, virtually a tourist attraction and, as the home of black pudding, sells the best black pudding in the country. This has cushioned it from the threat of the supermarkets and shopping malls. When I walk from Bury market to Gigg Lane for the football I pass as many as 20 coaches from all over the north who have brought hundreds of customers to the market. For once a local council dseres praise.

Elsewhere there are markets such as Clitheroe, with empty stalls and plummeting trade. It's sad but within five minutes walk of the market there is a Sainsbury's supermarket, a Booth's and a Tesco. Not only are the markets being killed by the supermarkets, so are the high streets of England. My local shopping street now has little more than estate agents, takeaways and charity shops, and the supermarkets are selling Chinese, Indian and pizza takeaways so soon even takeaways may disappear. Carnforth market is largely a key cutting van with an occasional fruit and veg stall turning up.

We are all guilty, if guilt is the right word. We've all found the ease of the supemarket appealing to the detriment of the local greengrocer, butcher and baker. But it is sad that the local shops, another aspect of community, have virtually disappeared under the corporate jackboot of big business.

This is the modern world!

PS It's an office block in ye olde market town of Ipswich, Suffolk.

Farewell To Pubs

I have spent most of today in Salford and East Manchester and was yet again shocked at the number of boarded up or demolished pubs. The pub on the left is the Hare and Hounds, a great traditonal local in Abbey Hey, Gorton. It has seen off almost every pub within a couple of miles, and believe me there were a lot of pubs in that part of Manchester, almost one on the corner of every terraced street. Let's hope the Hare and Hounds survives. So I started wondering again how it had come to this. I know we all have our pet theories but I think the problem, if indeed it is a problem, has many threads.

One reason is the smoking ban, which has undoubtedly contributed although it cannot be solely responsible for the level of pub closures. However, if I still smoked I wouldn't be prepared to go outside on days like this for a fag, I'd stay at home and drink and smoke in comfort, as indeed thousands of smokers are doing.

There was the Tory reforms in the '80s restricting the number of pubs a brewery could own. This opened the door to the plastic pub chains that we see today, that rip off landlord and customer alike. It also saw the beginning of the end for many small brewers such as Wilson's and many, many other small local brewers. I remember when you couldn't buy Boddington's south of Crewe because apparently 'it didn't travel well'. It isn't even made in Manchester today.

Young people also seem to have changed their drinking habits, which has inevitably contributed. We used to sit drinking beer in pubs until 11-00, later if there was a bit of 'extra hours'. We would then go clubbing, and continue drinking beer. It seems today, and not having kids I am one step removed, that young people tend to go straight to bars rather than pubs and hit shots straightaway rather than much weaker beer. Or, as friends kids have told us, they meet at someone's house to get drunk then go to a club.

There is also, linked to the change in younger peoples' habits, a breakdown of community. Pubs were once the heart of many communities, especially in working class areas. But people don't tend to socialise together publicly as much now. Social clubs, working mens' clubs, Tory and Labour clubs, parish social clubs have nearly all gone. There are changes in our homes that keep people from the pub. The proliferation of TV channels in recent years, especially sports channels. There are computers too that offer an alternative and any number of other lifesytle changes. There are government experts constantly harping on about having a bottle of wine when it's not Christams means you are an alcoholic who probably beats your wife and kids. All these things, and probably many more, have contributed.

From my own experience crap landlords put you off. I went a pub recently with a colleague at lunchtime. We ordered drinks and asked what food they were doing. We got a terse reply that they didn't do food. So we asked if he minded me popping over the road to bring a sandwich in. No, I couldn't, so we left without drinks and will never darken his doorway again. Some landlords should look at themselves when seeking to aportion blame.

So I still wonder if pub closures are a man made problem, or is nature just running its course?

Death Of The British Pub

Now I'm not prone to sanctimoniousness when it comes to booze, I enjoy a tipple as much as the next man, I am a Mancunian after all. In fact last night we had parents and sister and other 'arf round and we probably need a skip to take away the empty wine bottles. Anyway, the point is that TalkSport's Jon Gaunt is thankfully away and the much more cerebral Ian Collins is standing in. So I listened a bit this morning.

The debate has been on why Britons are now drinking themselves into oblivion. Yes, there has always been a healthy drinking culture and long may it last, but there is now something a bit worrying about the nature of it. By that I mean the level and nature of the drunkenness and the type of alcohol consumed. As ever the blame can be put fairly and squarely at the door of the politicians.

Some years back the Tory government messed up the laws on pub ownership drastically reducing the number of pubs that breweries were allowed to own, all in the name of competition. Enter 'pub chains' such as Wetherspoons and others. The nature of the pub changed, many becoming 'bars'. The trendies also wanted a continental style 'cafe culture', let's make the problem even worse in other words.

Successive governments then proceeded to tax booze so heavily that 'continental cafe culture' became the 'booze cruise'. Not just from Dover, for people down south, but a cheapie overnight from Hull for northerners too. And for those who couldn't afford the booze cruise, or the pub, cheap and nasty cider and spirits were the answer. And if you've stocked up properly then why stop drinking it until you have to?

But the level of public drunkenness is down to the death of the pub. In my youth, all those decades ago, we used to meet up in the pub and spend the night socialising over pints of bitter. After the pubs shut we would go on to a nightclub and carry on drinking bitter. Trying to appear sober, despite drowning as many pints as you could physically manage was a badge of honour.

Nowadays too many pubs, especially in city centres, resemble nightclubs and the noise makes old fashioned socialising virtually impossible. Furthermore drinking beer seems to be for old biddies, unless it is some super strength foreign lager. So kids are now getting pissed on spirits, which are much stronger than beer and have much more radical results.

Oh for the return of the good old fashioned pub, stinking of stale tobacco, just like the Hare and Hounds (above) in Gorton.

Mother Mac's

I was in Manchester yesterday afternoon on business, and that invariably includes a pint being in a very sociable kind of business. I couldn't resist a trip down memory lane and had to pop into Mother Mac's on Back Piccadilly, a pub I first frequented as a cocky youth some time in the late '70s and, thankfully, it hasn't changed.

If you don't know Manchester very well, and stick to the main roads when you visit, you won't know of the existence of this superb hostelry. It is a real pub that hasn't been savaged in the name of modernity and has a real friendly local feel in the City Centre. Most of the clientele are probably from Ancoats or Ardwick with the odd smattering of office workers en route to the suburbs via Piccadilly Station. Next time you're in Manchester treat yourself. Don't let the Manchester City FC paraphernalia put you off.