Alarming trends in pre-loading

In my late teenage years I began to drink alcohol. In my hometown of Boston, Lincolnshire, there were a couple of pubs, the Carpenters Arms and the Ship Tavern, where you could get served before you'd passed your 18th birthday.

Both pubs had slightly scary landlords who ran their boozers with an iron fist. Entering these pubs amounted to a rite de passage, a move to a higher plane of socialising where adults hogged the bar and the pre-legal drinkers were tolerated, under strict conditions, on the margins.

If you watched your manners, there was a chance you'd be allowed to buy a judicious half bitter (18p at the time) and be allowed to sit quietly in the corner with one or two mates. But woe betide you if you misbehaved. The result would be an instant ban together with what amounted to a humiliating public dressing down.

I can't ever remember getting splattered in either pub because booze was relatively expensive and the social disgrace involved was too agonising a thing to risk.

Drinking alcohol wasn't really the point — it was much more about entering a grown-up arena and having somewhere to go that wasn't home.

The one and only time I remember drinking at home involved a bottle of Martini from an off-licence — and ended in messy catastrophe. On the whole, drinking at home was a pretty pointless exercise — because whatever going to the pub was about, it wasn't really about booze.

Changing landscape​

The drinking landscape for youngsters has changed beyond recognition in the decades since I slipped through the doors of my local "starter pubs".

This magazine commissioned a survey of 500 drinkers​ in the 18 to 24 age bracket, which we unveiled at our Responsible Drinks Retailing conference yesterday.

The survey shows the frequency of home-drinking and the sharp decline in the traditional weekend night out.

A total of 70% of all alcohol consumed by this group is bought in the off-trade — and only just over one in three young drinkers buy their first alcohol in a pub.

Pre-loading is rife. Every single person we surveyed had a drink at home before going out. On average, young drinkers are imbibing at home between once or twice a week, averaging 3.3 drinks each before they go out. More alarmingly, one in five young drinkers drink alcohol at home three times a week or more.

Overall, the big Friday night out is in particularly serious decline. Those who go out on a Saturday night drink quite a lot of alcohol — eight drinks each on average. But the first drink of the night in a pub tends to be the fourth of the night. The conclusions are obvious — young drinkers are going to the pub, the home of supervised drinking, less often and later in favour of drinking cheap off-trade alcohol at home. I'm not sure this is progress at all.