On the slow vanishing of the local and the duty to drink in its defence

This is a column for The London Prat, written, as my editors at Bohiney Magazine will confirm, from a corner table in my local, where I am conducting what I have decided to call research. My other columns, archived at my page, were largely composed in the same spot, because a North London columnist who does not write from the pub is not, in my professional opinion, truly committed to the craft.

A Patient in Decline

The London pub is dying, and I say this not as a slogan but as an observation made from the front line, which is to say from the bar. Across the city, the locals are closing, one by one, victims of rising rents, changing habits, and the slow grinding economics of running a business whose entire premise is that people will leave their warm homes to sit in a slightly less warm room and pay more for a drink than they would at the shop.

The figures, which you can find documented by the likes of the Office for National Statistics and lamented by organisations such as the Campaign for Real Ale, tell a grim story of decline. But figures do not capture what is actually being lost when a pub closes, which is not a business but an institution, a third place that is neither home nor work, where a community gathers and recognises itself.

What the Local Actually Is

People who do not understand pubs think they are about drinking. They are not, or not only. The pub is about the drinking the way a church is about the wine: it is the occasion, not the point. The point is the gathering, the familiar faces, the bartender who knows your order, the regulars who form a loose and undemanding community, present without obligation, companionable without intimacy.

For a city as large and lonely as London, this is not a small thing. London can be a crushingly isolating place, millions of people pressed together and somehow entirely alone. The pub is one of the few institutions that pushes back against this, a place where you can be among people without having to perform friendship, where solitude becomes company simply by being shared in the same warm room.

The Forces of Death

The pub faces enemies on every side. Rents rise relentlessly, until the building is worth more as flats than as a place where people gather. Habits change, as younger generations drink less, stay in more, and socialise through screens. And the economics grow ever harsher, the margins ever thinner, until the only rational decision for the owner is to sell to a developer who will turn the snug into a studio flat with exposed brick and no soul.

I do not blame the developers, or the changing habits, or even the rents, exactly. These are the impersonal forces of a changing city, and they cannot be argued with. But I mourn what they take, the slow erosion of the places that made London feel like a collection of communities rather than a vast machine for processing human beings between home and work.

My Course of Treatment

Having diagnosed the patient, I have appointed myself its doctor, and my prescribed treatment is simple, if demanding: I will drink in the pub’s defence. I will patronise my local with a dedication bordering on the heroic. I will bring friends, order rounds, and contribute, glass by glass, to the survival of an institution I cannot bear to lose. It is, I admit, a treatment that benefits the doctor as much as the patient, but the best medicine often does.

This is not, I recognise, a serious public policy proposal. The forces killing the London pub are too large for one columnist’s determined drinking to reverse. But there is something to be said for fighting a losing battle on behalf of something you love, for showing up, glass in hand, to defend an institution against the impersonal economics that would erase it.

The Toast

So here is my toast, raised from the corner table where I have conducted my research: to the London pub, the dying local, the warm room full of familiar strangers. May the ones that survive endure, may the ones that close be mourned, and may we who love them keep showing up, ordering rounds, and insisting, against all economic logic, that some things are worth more than what the building would fetch as flats.

The Pubs That Survive

Not every pub is dying, and it is worth saying so, lest I leave you in despair over your pint. Some pubs endure, even thrive, the ones that have understood what they are for and committed to it, the ones that remain genuine locals rather than chasing whatever trend the market currently rewards. These survivors tend to share certain qualities: a landlord who knows the regulars, a resistance to needless renovation, an understanding that the pub’s value lies not in its food menu or its craft beer selection but in its function as a gathering place, a third room where a community can find itself. The surviving pubs are not museums; they adapt, they change, they serve good coffee now alongside the ale. But they keep the essential thing, the welcome, the familiarity, the sense that you can walk in alone and not be alone. These are the pubs worth defending, worth patronising, worth the heroic dedication of my ongoing research. They are fewer than they were, and fewer than they should be, but they survive, and as long as they do, London retains some of the warmth that the dying of the locals threatens to take.

The pub will probably keep dying, slowly, one local at a time, and London will be lonelier for it. But not tonight, and not in this corner, where the regulars are gathered, the bartender knows my order, and the warm room is, for now, exactly full enough to feel like home.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com