13,000 UK Pubs Closed Since 2000, And Kentish Town Road Tells The Story
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat contribute reporting from somewhere within the M25.
I have, in the past month, walked past three separate pubs in Kentish Town that have, since 2010, been a pub, then a gastropub, then a small-plates restaurant, then a wine bar, then a cocktail bar, then closed, then a pub again, and then closed again. The high streets of north London are doing something, and I do not think it is a healthy thing.
The Pub Question
According to the British Beer and Pub Association, the United Kingdom has lost approximately 13,000 pubs since 2000. North London, by my unscientific personal count, has lost something on the order of 40 percent of the pubs I would have expected to walk into when I was 23. Some of the closures have been replaced. Some of the replacements have themselves closed. The cycle is now visible enough that it has its own grammar.
The reasons are well-rehearsed. Business rates. Beer tax. The post-2010 fall in real disposable income. The post-2020 contraction in office-worker lunch trade. The conversion of pub freeholds to flats by property companies whose patience for pub revenue is, mathematically, less than their patience for flat revenue.
What This Costs
What it costs, in social terms, is what Adam Smith Institute and the urban-planning literature both call “third places.” Spaces that are not home and not work, where strangers can become acquaintances and acquaintances can become friends. Pubs do this work. So do small cafes. So do barbershops, libraries, and the kind of corner shop where the owner remembers your name. London is, slowly, becoming a city where the third places are smaller, fewer, and more expensive.
The Thing I Notice
The thing I notice, when I walk along Kentish Town Road on a Thursday evening, is that the people are still there. The demand for the third place has not vanished. The supply has been thinned. The result is that the remaining good pubs are full, all the time, and the people who used to drift across three or four neighbourhood pubs in an evening are now compressed into the two that have survived.
This is not, by itself, a tragedy. The remaining pubs are doing well. But it is a slow concentration, and concentration tends, over time, to push prices up. A pint that cost £4.50 in 2018 in Kentish Town is now £6.50 in the same pub. A pint in central London is, regularly, over £8.
The Optimistic Bit
The optimistic bit, and there is one, is that some of the new replacements are good. The wine bars are, on average, better than the wine bars of fifteen years ago. The micro-pubs, where they have appeared, are excellent. The neighbourhood breweries are doing things with low-strength session beers that the older pub model could never have supported. Something is being gained. It is just being gained at a different cost structure, and to a slightly different clientele.
What I would like, more than anything else, is one more permanent pub between Tufnell Park and Kentish Town. I would like it to be moderately scruffy. I would like the bar staff to remember my name. I would like the pints to cost less than £6. I am, increasingly, prepared to write to the council about this.
For more visit my author page and read prat.uk. See also The Poke.
