The British pub.

If you say a British pub you get an image of oak beams. Horse brasses hanging on the wall, open fires. A place were a local community comes together and interacts with each other. Talking about local issues and exchange gossip. Our main soap operas all have the local pub at the centre of them and that is how we like to think of them. A place where you can go and sit talk and be with the like minded people who will respect you and you will respect them. It is an ideal image of a perfect place for the community.

The problem with that is that they are getting harder to find and more difficult to maintain. The British pub is an institution that is like many things in the mind set of the British a thing of the past. But is still a thing that we all love to have on the door step to go to. Like village shops and post offices the actual economic reality is that the pub is going threw some horrific changes and is fighting for survival.

The idea of a pub is an interesting thing that is only more an invention of the industrial revolution more than any other thing as we know it. The British have always had the liking for the odd drink. Visiting dignitaries from foreign courts often commented on the amount of alcohol that the British consumed. You say that it is with in our national identity to have a drink.

But the problem was as the city’s grew and we became more industrialised the placed that the mass of people drank were not that very nice. Probably the best illustration of how drinking was looked at is an illustration. Hogarth’s “Beer Street” and “Gin Street”. The two images are one of happy jolly fellows drinking beer in a happy and convivial way. And in “Gin Street” the hell of the world going to rack and ruin. And you could say that it was this that made the pubs that we know today.

If you made alcohol to sell to people so that they could consume it you made money. Organise it so that the people could drink in a place that you owned and that would sell your beer all the better. And so the it was birth of the British pub. You had inns and taverns all dotted around but this was a more organised and disciplined, that came from big business and big profits.

Pubs became institutions that people went to. But now things are changing. Pubs are disappearing because people do no longer go to them and we are up in arms about it. But the truth is that we do not want to go to them. It has been a slow erosion of increasing prices, social change and different more varied entertainment.

We all long for a local shop or post office but the truth is that they have all started to close as we all shop in the supermarkets and the telephone and email have become the more popular ways of communicating.

Pubs have changed to try and keep up with the changes in the market. Once al you could get was a drink and some nuts from behind the bar. Now they do food, have big screen televisions and organised events. They have to keep people coming back. But in doing so the actual idea of a pub being what it once was is no longer true.

Will the British pub survive , yes it will but not as many as they was and maybe it will revert back to a more simple time as we decide to reclaim the place that a pub once was and not what it thinks it should be. Only the future will tell what is in store for the pub but it will always have a place on our high streets.