I am, as my mother will tell you, usually in tones of faint despair, a carbon copy of my late father.
I am bookish, impractical, quiet (“You never start a conversation!” says the woman who hasn’t had an unexpressed thought since 1946), essentially incomprehensible to her, just as he was, and her attachment to us both was and remains a bafflement to us all. But never more so than when it came to his and my love of going to the pub.
God, I love a pub. And like, I suspect, most pub lovers, my platonic ideal is largely that laid out in the Evening Standard by George Orwell 80 years ago almost to the day in his well-known paean to his perfect pub, The Moon Under the Water.
It was fictitious but almost apprehensible – he noted that he knew of pubs that comprised at least eight of his 10 main stipulations: Victorian architecture and fittings; games only played in the public bar; no radio or piano so that talking is possible; barmaids knowing regulars by name; a garden; snack and “a good lunch” on offer; draught stout; the right vessels for the right drink; selling tobacco, cigarettes, aspirins, stamps; and being “obliging about letting you use the telephone”.
Of course smoking in pubs is outlawed now (a rare modern improvement, I think, my motto being: “Live and let live as long as it doesn’t force other people to ingest your carcinogenic output”), and we all have our own telephones. But replace the last stricture with “obliging about providing the password to what proves to be a robust network” and the whole thing still works pretty well.
It should also be noted that one of feminism’s most underrated successes is to have made women eating or drinking – even alone! – in pubs socially acceptable. You can even read while you do it. It’s brilliant. This, like women being able to get mortgages and bank loans in their own names, has only happened in my lifetime, so it’s also terrifying, but let’s take the wins where we can and however recently they happened.
We are, famously, a pub nation. What else could we be? Café culture belongs to those with the weather to sustain it, as well as the attachments to other land masses to provide the cross pollination that raises you to such a level of sophistication in the first place. We are a cold, rainy little island whose people have from the very beginning needed to huddle together for warmth and sustenance, not meet voluntarily for glamorous chat and chilled cocktails. Imagine.
Yet pubs are in danger. Last year one pub a day closed permanently in England and Wales; across the UK more than 15,000 closed between 2000 and 2024. Of late, Labour and Reform have both raced to outline their plans to help stanch the tide of closures.
Last year, brewers began a campaign to have cask ale added to the Unesco Intangible Cultural Heritage list. This is to think too small. It is the whole of pubs and pub culture that needs to be on there. What you drink in a pub is only a small part of the experience and not even what the true pub lover is there for. You go for the quiet companionship, the comradeship. The knowledge that you are amongst people who also like to watch the world wag past without having to engage with it too directly. Yes, this is also a working definition of functioning alcoholics, but they are a discussion for another time.
It disturbs me – and my half of cider, please, and some ready-salted, which I shall take over to the furthest corner table – that the most deeply connected I feel to politics is when I read of yet another attack-via-ill-considered-tax-reform-by-the-current-government on the viability of pubs. And it disturbs me even more when I find myself reading about Reform’s five-point Save Our Pubs plan and nodding along at it.
It’s not that I’m going to vote for them – even if I believed a word out of their or any other politician’s mouth at this late stage of the game. What disturbs me is that they have understood something vital that Labour evidently has not. It has understood that the ineffable is as important as the bottom line, even when you are attempting to balance a nation’s books – especially if you want to keep doing so after the next election.
Culture itself, the answer to the question of “what it means to British”, may be intangible. But there are a handful of ways in which we experience concretely and solid representations of it that we can point to, and that give and reflect a meaning we struggle to express in words. We know in our bones that pubs just suit us. They suit this odd little island.
They suit the crowded bits by offering a place to gather and have fun, strengthening community bonds and helping to lubricate the introduction of newcomers to the area. And they suit the uncrowded bits – have you ever felt happiness like the happiness you feel when you see a country pub’s glowing windows looming out of the wintry dark as it has done for generations past, offering succour of all kinds?
Treat them as businesses to be squeezed, treat them only as what they are instead of appreciating what they mean, and you will never move people to vote for you or for the ideals you hold dear. Why should they, when you have proven yourself incapable of this smaller abstraction of thought? You mess with a pub at far more of your peril than you think.
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