Forget a pint and a friendly landlord, pubs of the future will be about the experience
The experience, sure, fine, go for it. The pub? Also, fine, go for it.
But the two are different things, in the same way that a caff and a restaurant are different things. Nowt wrong with either, but they are different. And yes, a pub is different from a bar, from a cafe and so on.
Depending on the venue, going out can either be a melting pot (everyone talks to anyone) or a salad bowl (you arrive with your friends, you only talk to your friends, you leave with your friends).
In the melting pot pubs, people make their own entertainment by talking to each other.
“I’m just popping out to the pub for an experience”.
Andrew M,
I think a lot of the melting pot pubs went with the smoking ban, which is one of the reasons I rarely go in them now. There just isn’t the same feeling. The pubs I went in lost their atmosphere within months. I find bars more enjoyable now.
BoM4 – Yarp, the pub scene died on the 1st of July 2007.
And idk, man, in retrospect that was a more important moment in English history than we perhaps realise. Cromwell’s Major-Generals were back, but this time they were wearing the smug, insipid gay faces of the Metropolitan arseholocracy.
I like to think the Even Gloriouser Revolution will involve Nigel Farage smoking 20 Regal King Size and playing Aunt Sally in a pub called The Lion.
I have fond memories of local pubs where only men were allowed in, women being confined to the snug, served through a separate hatch and neither seen nor heard in the main pub area. If you wanted the company of women, you had to patronise a lounge bar and they were used mainly by men in married couples of if single who were described in the usage of the time as “queer”.
Pubs stopped being ‘proper’ pubs when they banned cock fighting. Or gambling. Or bare knuckle boxing. Or duck baiting. If only we could return to those halcyon days eh…..
I used to go to a sports bar off Haymarket with an indoor basketball cage. Absolutely great fun, but i’m not popping in there 4 times a week. Pubs, pubs, are for living in.
And so not a surprise the local the “Bounce” to me has taken over a nightclub rather than a pub. I think its a great idea because you need something to get people off their phones and interacting. (Also it probably helps there’s a large untapped market of Chinese Students that drink about half a shandy on a night out but are obsessed with ping pong)
Pub wise- i remember welcoming the gastro pub. i.e. you didn’t use to get a choice of beer when you went to a restaurant. I thought it was great you could drink one or 2 at the bar, sit and have your meal and stay on the same choice. However when every pub converts to that you have the opposite problem, even to the extent that some of them ask you to be seated and not drink at the bar. Hunacceptable.
Pubs did serve the great purpose of keeping bores out of the way of the rest of us.
I was in Ludlow last week; visited a couple of pubs after lunch. All busy, good atmosphere. One attached to a new brewery, with excellent beer at a decent price. The British pub isn’t dead.
@BF
And I have fond memories of drinking in Birches in Angel Court. Which wouldn’t serve women. Although there weren’t barking mad women who insisted on buying their own, let alone springing for a round, in those happy days. One of the original coffee houses from which the LSX evolved. 300 years of wheeling, dealing & imbibing, alas no more. And if one requested a Pimms, one would be asked “Which one?” For they did indeed serve all of them. (6?) In pints. Without the bloody fruit salad. Spiked with a measure or two of the appropriate spirit, to taste.
I have fond memories of local pubs where only men were allowed in, women being confined to the snug, served through a separate hatch and neither seen nor heard in the main pub area. If you wanted the company of women, you had to patronise a lounge bar and they were used mainly by men in married couples of if single who were described in the usage of the time as “queer”.
My father was a landlord in a pub in Huddersfield when the law to ban Tap rooms and other men only spaces was brought in. When he took over the pub he made it clear there’d be no swearing in any public rooms where women were allowed and if a woman complained or he heard swearing they got one warning and then were banned “for as long as my name is above the door”. It didn’t take long for word to get out and he built up quite a successful pub.
When the ban came in he made it quite clear that the swearing rule did not apply to the Tap room and that women who went in shouldn’t bother complaining if they heard swearing.
@BiS Women buying their own? My missus not only expects me to get her prosecco for her, but to pour her glass when I get to the table. I get a meaningful cough if I forget to pour. Mind you, she’s putting up with a dozen smokers around her, so fair enough, and rightly so.
Isn’t the ‘pint and friendly landlord’ the experience though?