When a round for four costs more than a weekly shop used to, the local stops being a habit and becomes an occasion

Price of a Pint in London: What 6.50 Pounds Is Doing to the Pub

There is a pub near me with a tiled front and a dog asleep by the fire. I have been going there for years. Last week I bought a round for four people and the card machine showed a figure that made me check whether I had accidentally bought the dog as well.

A guide to the cost of living in the capital puts the price of a pint at a pub at 6.50 pounds on average. My local is slightly above that. A round of four is therefore twenty-six pounds and upward. Two rounds and you have spent what I used to budget for a week’s food.

A Sense of Proportion

I know. There are greater injustices. Nobody has a right to cheap lager. But the pub matters in a way that goes beyond the drink, and its price is a fair measure of how the city treats ordinary pleasure.

The same guide offers three monthly budgets for a single person. The leanest allows 100 pounds for eating out and 50 for “coffee/social.” At 6.50 a pint, fifty pounds is seven and a half pints a month. That is not a social life. That is a prescription.

Why It Costs So Much

I asked around and read around, and the reasons are not mysterious. Publicans are not getting rich.

The costs of running a pub have risen on every line. Energy. Wages. Rent, especially in London. Business rates. Beer duty. The price the brewery charges. Many pubs are tied to a pub company and must buy their beer from it at set prices.

Publicans regularly say that out of the price of a pint, the amount that reaches them as profit is measured in pence. I have no reason to doubt it. Pubs have been closing across the country for years, and they do not close because they are making too much money.

The Consequences

What happens when the pint passes a certain point is that people change how they use the pub. They go less. They have one instead of three. They “pre-drink” at home, which is a phrase that would have baffled my grandfather. They go only for occasions.

That shifts what a pub is. The local, in its classic form, depended on regulars: people who came in several times a week, knew each other, and treated the place as a second living room. Regulars are not possible at 6.50. Or they are possible only for people with money, which is a different thing.

Who Is Priced Out

Think about who cannot afford it. Someone on take-home pay of around 2,360 pounds a month, which is what one guide calculates for a salary of 35,000, paying London rent, has very little left. That guide describes living on that salary as sustainable for many, particularly those sharing, but leaving little financial buffer.

Little buffer means the pub is the first thing to go. And it is exactly those people, in small flats and shared houses with no living room, who most need somewhere else to sit.

The Pub as Public Space

This is the bit I care about. London homes are small. Many have no communal space at all. The pub has for centuries been where people without drawing rooms met their friends. It is warm. It has chairs. Nobody asks you to leave if you nurse a half for two hours, or they did not use to.

As other free and cheap places have disappeared, the libraries with shorter hours and the youth clubs that closed, the pub has carried more weight. When it becomes expensive too, the result is people staying in, alone, looking at a phone.

Things That Help

I do not want to be only gloomy. There are ways round it.

Some chains sell a pint for well under the average. Whatever you think of their carpets, they keep prices down.

Community-owned pubs, bought by local people when the owner wanted to sell, are a growing movement.

Happy hours and midweek deals exist if you look.

And nobody says you have to drink beer. A lime and soda is still cheap, and the dog by the fire does not judge.

What I Would Ask For

If I had the ear of whoever sets these things, I would ask for a fairer tax deal for pubs relative to supermarkets, which can sell alcohol far more cheaply because their costs are so different. I would ask for business rates that recognise a pub as a community asset. And I would ask councils to think twice before granting permission to turn every closed boozer into flats.

There are counter-arguments. Public health experts would point out that cheaper alcohol is not an unmixed good. They are right. But there is a difference between drinking at home alone and drinking in company, under the eye of a landlord who knows when you have had enough.

Last Orders

I paid for the round. Of course I did. One does. And we sat by the fire for two hours and put the world to rights, which is cheaper than therapy and nearly as effective.

But I noticed that we each had one. And that the pub was half empty on a Friday.

And to Cheer Up

The pub is the natural home of British humour. The London Prat draws from it in its English satirical news on the price of a pint and UK satirical news about pubs. My other pieces on surviving London are there as well. Bohiney Magazine covers the American bar tab.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/