I suspect that I mention pubs quite a lot in my blogs: they
are very much part of my life and I did come very close to buying one – twice.
To me they represent many things: a place to drink one’s own choice of poison,
a meeting place for friends, a place to make new friends or to chat with
passing acquaintances, a place to play the only games that I really like, a
place to enjoy live music, and so on (see my pub in the bookshop for more).
I know that I have often written about the two bars of La
Fresneda, our Spanish village, but think that I have said little about the bars
of Stow-on-the Wold, our Cotswold base. However, there is something interesting going on there at
present which reflects the swingeing changes that have rocked the pub trade over
the last decades.
Years ago, pubs were owned by the breweries producing the beer, and in those pubs you drank the beer of the brewery that owned them,
or lumped it. There were a few, so called, “free houses” where a variety of
draught beers might be found, but by far the majority were tied to a brewery.
Then, stimulated by government legislation, greed and corporate economics,
things began to change: the big breweries sold off their vast estates of pubs
and concentrated on brewing and spending their piles of cash. Pub companies
bought chains of pubs which then purchased beer from the ever-increasing number
of breweries and supplied it, at inflated prices, to the tenants and managers
of their pubs. Later again, some of the breweries that had retained their pub
estates sold the brewery, usually for housing development, and then outsourced
their core competence: brewing. All of this has had a profound effect on the
pub trade and, of course, on the pubs of Stow.
There is one area however where Stow does buck the trend and
that is in closures. Pubs in the UK are still closing at the rate of twenty a
week or more, yet those in Stow have been stable for a very long time. There
are ten bars, some of which are within hotels, others are stand-alone pubs and just
one is a club. The population of this country town is about two thousand so
that is a goodly number of boozers.
When I first began to visit the place, the pubs concentrated
almost entirely on selling drink, and were themselves partitioned into public
bars for the working-class locals and lounge bars for the rich and the ‘better’
classes – or so it seemed to me. Nowadays the partitions have gone, the bars
are mostly food rather than drink led, the classes have merged or drifted
upwards and a true local is a rarity, my wife being one. Meanwhile, some of the pubs remain tied to
traditional breweries; others have seen many transformations.
I used to predict that Stow could not sustain so many
drinking establishments and that the Bell, the most remote from the centre
would be the first to go. It scraped along breaking the hearts of many an
aspiring tenant and was an encumbrance to the pub company which owned it. I
think the most enduring tenants during that period were two lesbians, one
of whom regularly paced the bar draped in a large, live lizard. Even I once
offered to buy the freehold of the place, but was turned down.
Finally, a lady entrepreneur did manage to buy it up, spent
a lot of money on it, imported a very good chef, introduced well-kept real ale and
installed pretty, polite barmaids. She brought with her a load of discerning
and well-heeled customers and The Bell is now such a success that a brewery
has bought it from her – Youngs’ brewery. Except that Youngs no longer brews
beer! It sold its wonderful London production base some years ago and the beers
are now brewed by Charles Wells. I presume the company is using cash raised by
the sale of the brewery site to purchase pubs like The Bell.
Up the road from The Bell is a pub and hotel which has
changed hands, and names, rather a lot over the years. It was the Eagle and
Child at one time and is now the Porch House. Like many in this country, it
claims to be the oldest in England. It too has now been bought by a brewery –
Brakspear. But this brewery has also sold its brewing facility and its beers
are brewed at the Wychwood brewery in nearby Witney, and that brewery has itself
been bought by another called Marston’s located in Wolverhampton.
And so these bewildering cycles go round, recycling
landlords and beers and tossing out dartboards, skittle alleys, pool tables
and local characters along the way. Is it bad? Is it a tragedy? For some yes,
for others not.
Nowadays there is a good selection of pubs in Stow that sell a
range of beers and a variety of food in restaurant-like surroundings. At present,
two of the bars are closed for renovation; they will no doubt open as gastro
pubs of some sort. So if you want to play darts or pool in Stow-on-the-Wold, or
want to drink with the few remaining ‘locals’ what can you do? Join the club,
perhaps.
