Communities will back pubs in hard times

Pub operator Jay Smith set about galvanising community spirit in five UK villages to save their local pub as part of a TV series called Save our Boozer. Below he reflects on the experience — and life in the pub trade.

As we enter 2010, those of us with even the mildest of interest in the licensed trade will no doubt be bracing ourselves for yet more bad news, yet more closures, yet more headlines about the pros and cons of the pubco and, more than likely, yet more empty promises from Westminster about the plight of our belleagured industry.

This year, I have no doubt, will be much the same as 2009 and the latter part of 2008. Whichever party is victorious in this year's General Election there will be little room on their agenda for the Great British Pub.

With wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan, rampant unemployment and a banking system sitting proudly astride your hard earned tax pound, there just isn't the time, inclination or resource for any minister to come riding to our rescue. Sad, some would say unfair but most definately true.

My personal experience is very similar to a lot of other people, a few ups and certainly a few downs. I looked at an industry that seemed to reward hard working, personable people and I took the plunge in 1996 with my first bar.

It was an absolute disaster and it served me right. Too many staff, no customer focus, no cost control and no real direction from a marketing point of view. It roared off like an unchained beast for the first six months but then someone who knew what they were doing opened a shiney new bar up the road and in a heartbeat my custmoers were gone and my costs remained huge.

I was fortunate enought to be twenty five years old and oddly unphased by my plight. I somehow convinced the major brewer, to whom I owed an absolute fortune, to stay on my team.

I wasn't quite so successful with the bloke who came to repossess my car but it's fair to say that, fourteen years later, I have learned to live without a bright yellow Lotus that looked rather like a pedallo!

I still own that original bar and I am very proud both of it and the team who run it. In succesive years it has been crowned the best bar in town and it now has a little brother in York which picks up the odd national award too!

By pure chance I was sitting in a country pub, just outside my home town of Harrogate in 2006, when the landlord announced that this would be his last month in business. The pub, he said, had been for sale for some time and, other than property developers, nobody wanted it.

It was the last pub in the village and caused outrage among local residents. This outrage seemed to focus entirely on stopping the nasty property developers from getting planning permission to turn the pub into houses, until a new landlord popped up out of nowhere (which I thought was a little harsh on the poor landlord as it also meant he couldn't sell it).

I watched the story with interest and for some considerable time the locals proudly claimed to have a village with no pub to drink in but a rather untidy old building that used to be one making a bit of a mess of their main street.

Writing on the wall​

The writing was on the wall for many village pubs from that moment on from what I could see.The agents websites were packed with pubs for sale, pubs to let, pubs with leases to assign and the backdrop to all of this was the temptation for many to turn to a pubco and "own a pub" for £15,000 plus fees.

Around the same time I was asked by a production company to front a show about pubs and bars, I forget what it was to be called but in all honesty it was the sort of show about our industry that could only ever have been thought up by someone who once drank in a pub but didn't take much notice of what it meant.

I declined the offer (the show was mercifuly never made) and instead took an idea to a different company which was to become "Save Our Boozer" on UKTV.

Making the show has been an incredible and rewarding experience, we've tracked down five communities with no pub and given the locals a chance to sort the situation out for themselves.

We didn't use any pubco properties as they wouldn't talk to us but we did use a few that had been earmarked for housing and I'm glad to say that since filming began in January last year all five of the pubs are still running and all because of the hard work of the people who live nearby. None of them get paid to turn the business around and most of them continue to be run soley by volunteer staff.

From the Greyhound in Cumbria to the Yarcombe Inn in Devon, it has been truly inspirational to see what communities can achieve when given a chance. None of them really want to work all day and then pull a free shift behind the bar but they don't want to go back to having no social interaction with their neighbours, no meeting place, no focal point to village life.

The smoking ban, the supermarkets, the recession, the pubcos and the Chancellor?

They are all for someone else to write about but what I can say with my hand on my heart is this; if the great people of Grizebeck, Cold Norton, Llanarnon Yn Lal, Yarcombe and Downall Green are anything to go by then the Great British Pub could well be saved by the Great British Public!