Lowri Griffiths on the slow death of the North London boozer, the rise of the fourteen-pound pint, and what we actually lose when ‘community anchor’ becomes a marketing term

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

The Crown and Anchor on my road has been a pub for as long as anyone in the neighbourhood can remember, which means at least since 1987 when the current landlady’s father took it on and probably longer. It had sticky floors that were a deliberate aesthetic choice by at least 2003, a fruit machine that nobody ever actually won on, a regular clientele whose average age was sixty-four, and a Sunday roast that was simultaneously the worst you had ever had and the only one you wanted. It also had, which I did not fully appreciate until I no longer had it, a quality that I can only describe as weight: the social weight of a place where the same people had been having the same arguments about the same topics for twenty years, where the furniture remembered everyone who had ever sat in it, where you could walk in alone and not be alone.

The Crown and Anchor is now a Craft Beer Experience Venue. It is called Hop Stories. The floors are bare concrete. There are forty-seven taps. The cheapest pint is twelve pounds and fifty pence, which is fourteen pounds and ten pence after the three percent “card handling optimization” that appears on the receipt in very small text. The Sunday roast has been replaced by a “seasonal sharing plate experience” that costs thirty-eight pounds for two and arrives in approximately fourteen minutes, which is either very good or deeply wrong depending on your philosophical position on roast beef cooking times.

What We Tell Ourselves About Gentrification

The standard line on London’s pub closures, of which there have been approximately seven thousand since 2005 according to the Campaign for Real Ale’s annual surveys, is that they are a straightforward economic story: rising rents, business rates, reduced beer consumption as the population gets older and more health-conscious, changing leisure habits among younger generations who drink less and go out differently. All of this is true and none of it is the whole story. The Crown and Anchor did not close because people stopped wanting a pub. It closed because the property that housed it became worth more as something else, and the decision about what something else it should become was made by people who live in neither this street nor this postcode and whose financial model for “craft beer experience venue” does not require the establishment to serve the community in any sense that the word community traditionally implies.

The British Beer and Pub Association estimates that 54 pubs close every month in the UK. The proportion of those closures attributable to commercial conversion — the pub building sold into residential or retail use rather than being taken on by a new licensee — has been increasing. The planning protections that exist for pubs designated as Assets of Community Value provide some protection against conversion but are not automatic and require local residents to nominate and successfully register the pub before a sale is agreed, a process that requires organisation, awareness, and time that community groups often lack when a sale happens quickly. The Crown and Anchor was listed as an ACV. We lost it anyway, because the ACV status provides a right of first refusal during a moratorium period but does not restrict the eventual sale price, and the community group that formed to try to buy it could not raise the money the property commanded at market value. The community value was recognised. The community could not pay for it. These are two different things.

What Hop Stories Is Actually For

I have been to Hop Stories. I will not pretend I have not, because honesty is something I value even when it is self-incriminating. The beer is, in fact, excellent. The staff are friendly and knowledgeable in a way that the Crown and Anchor’s staff were also friendly and knowledgeable, in a different register. The space is clean and well-lit and designed for the photograph in a way that the Crown and Anchor absolutely was not and would have been deeply suspicious of. It is a good venue of its type. Its type is: a venue designed for people who are visiting this neighbourhood rather than living in it, whose price point is calibrated to incomes that are not the median income of the street it stands on, and whose cultural logic is hospitality as experience product rather than hospitality as neighbourhood institution.

The people drinking at Hop Stories on a Friday evening are not, mostly, my neighbours. They are people who have come from further away, who found it on an app, who will have a very nice time and go back to wherever they came from. This is not a moral failure on their part. It is simply a different social function from the one the Crown and Anchor served. That function — the one where the same people are reliably in the same place being the same community for each other — is not available for fourteen pounds a pint and a card handling optimization charge. It was available for six pounds a pint and a sticky floor and a fruit machine that nobody ever won. The fourteen pounds buys you better beer. The six pounds bought you somewhere to belong. I know which one I miss.

Lowri Griffiths writes from North London for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/lowri-griffiths.

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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/my-local-pub-replaced-craft-beer-experience-venue-not-coping-well/