On vanishing pubs, the loss of the third place, and where a city goes to be itself

There was a pub at the end of my road, and now there are flats, and I have been quietly grieving in a way that feels disproportionate until I try to explain it, at which point I realise it is not disproportionate at all. I wrote about this for Bohiney Magazine and expanded on it for The London Prat, where my running elegy for the city I keep losing appears with grim regularity, because the slow death of the London local is one of those losses that is funny until it suddenly is not.

The pub as the last democratic space

A good pub is one of the few genuinely democratic spaces left in this city, somewhere you can sit for the price of a single pint and simply exist, with no expectation that you spend, perform, or optimise anything. It is what sociologists rather grandly call a third place, neither home nor work, where a community actually meets itself. The campaign to protect Britain’s pubs, waged by organisations such as CAMRA, understands that the local is not just a business but an institution, and that when one closes, a neighbourhood loses something it cannot easily get back.

My local was nothing special, which was precisely the point. The carpet had seen things. The quiz was unwinnable. The landlord knew my order and, more importantly, knew when not to ask why I was in on a Tuesday afternoon. It was ordinary and warm and entirely mine, and now it is a development of one-bedroom flats marketed at people who will never know it was there.

The economics of the vanishing local

The reasons are depressingly familiar: the value of the land beneath a pub vastly exceeds the value of the pub itself, business rates and costs have climbed, drinking habits have changed, and the maths eventually stops working. Pubs have been closing across the country for years, and London, where land is worth more than gold, has been hit especially hard. The data on closures, tracked by industry bodies and reflected in figures from the Office for National Statistics on the hospitality sector, describes a steady erosion of a beloved institution, one local at a time.

What we lose is not just the beer

It is tempting to be sentimental, and I am, shamelessly. But there is a serious point underneath, which is that the loss of these spaces is the loss of the places where a city is allowed to be unproductive together. Everything in London increasingly costs money, demands a booking, requires a reason. The pub asked nothing of you except your company. As the locals vanish and are replaced by flats and chains and spaces designed to extract maximum spend per minute, the city loses its capacity for the unplanned, the lingering, the gloriously pointless evening that turns into something memorable precisely because no one intended it to.

The fight to keep them

It is not entirely a funeral. Communities have fought, sometimes successfully, to save their pubs, listing them as assets of community value, buying them collectively, refusing to let them go quietly. A local saved by the people who love it is one of the more genuinely heartening things this city produces, proof that a neighbourhood can still occasionally beat the spreadsheet. These victories are rare, but they are real, and they suggest that the death of the local is not quite as inevitable as the developers would like us to believe.

Still, the trend is what it is, and I find myself mourning pubs I never even visited, on the principle that their mere existence made the city feel more like itself. A London without its locals would be richer on paper and poorer in every way that matters, a place optimised within an inch of its life, with nowhere left to simply be.

Last orders

So I will raise a glass, in a different pub now, slightly further from home, to the one at the end of my road, and to all the others, the unremarkable, irreplaceable locals quietly disappearing from the map of the city. They were ordinary, and that was their genius. London is losing them, and it is losing something of itself in the process, and the least I can do is notice, out loud, before the last of them calls time. The flats, I am sure, will be lovely. They will never be a local. Nothing ever is again, once the local is gone.

The cost of a city with nowhere to linger

What worries me most, in the small hours, is what replaces the local. Not flats, exactly, but a certain ethos, the conversion of every shared space into a place that wants something from you, a booking, a minimum spend, a reason to be there. The pub asked for none of that, and its disappearance is part of a wider pattern in which the unmonetised, unhurried corners of the city are steadily squeezed out. A London with nowhere to simply linger is a poorer London, however shiny the developments that take the locals’ place, and the loss is the kind you only fully notice once it is complete.

For more on the things we are quietly losing, the team enjoys The Daily Mash, last orders forever.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/