This being a painfully trendy part of north London, the local chapel had just finished a memorial service for Lou Reed — ‘Wake on the Wild Side’ if you will — and the exotically costumed congregation had arrived for their after-party. A DJ in the corner began mixing the Velvets with vintage Bowie, Eno and Blondie.
We wanted to talk so we moved round the other side, where the central bar dulled the music. Fairy lights gleamed against the gloaming, in that way pubs have of making you want to hibernate there all winter.
Between helping to serve a still-busy lunchtime food crowd and making sure we were OK for drinks, publican Kirsty Valentine told us how yesterday she’d had a wedding in for 12 hours.
“They turned up 40 minutes early because the service itself was only nine minutes long!” she said. “But we still managed to be ready for them.”
Valentine had given the wedding party her typical welcome. And the guests had stayed far longer than anyone had planned.
Negotiations
Five days later, I’m back at the Alma to watch bailiffs and police evict Valentine and her live-in staff from the premises. Press including the Publican’s Morning Advertiser are asked to wait outside while desperate final negotiations with Enterprise Inns take place over the phone.
“We offered to pay the outstanding amount in full, but they’re not interested,” says Valentine finally. “They just want us out.”
The Alma was usually billed as a gastropub, and with good reason: the food was pricey for a pub, but easily of restaurant standard, served with easy-going informality.
But the Alma was also a community pub. About 30 regulars convene to help Valentine move handfuls of belongings to the flat of a couple who have become her closest friends via the pub. As the bailiffs change the locks on the pub doors, I help wheel a bike laden with bags over the road to their hallway.
Now homeless, Valentine stays with these friends for a week. The following week, she stays with another couple of her regulars. She’ll be staying in our spare room soon — a week at each place, until she can sort something out.
It’s easy to forget how often the pub is a home as well as a business.
Heated
When someone loses their savings, their job and their home in one swift legal action, tempers get heated and rash things are said. The week after the eviction, the police are called again when Valentine turns up to collect the rest of her possessions at a time that was pre-agreed with Enterprise, and is told she cannot in fact have access.
Whether this is miscommunication, misunderstanding or a broken promise isn’t clear, but once again her friends are by her side to calm and comfort her.
Finally, the following day, she is granted access to remove her possessions from the office and flat. As a red-eyed Valentine opens the door to let us in to help carry boxes, a bustling, brisk elderly lady attempts to breeze past into the pub.
“I’d like to speak to the landlord about putting up a poster to advertise our local school jumble sale,” she announces.
“I’ve been evicted,” smiles Valentine. “The pub is closed.”
The message doesn’t seem to sink in, and the woman attempts to push past again. Then she sees the empty back bar, the piles of filing boxes and bin bags. Her face falls in shock.
“Can’t you appeal?” she asks.
“Already have,” says Valentine.
“Isn’t there anything we can do?”
I move past, into the pub. As I shift box after box of till rolls, supplier details, invoices, accounts, bank statements, staff records, diaries and cookbooks, I’m struck by the sheer amount of stuff a publican has to keep track of, above and beyond standing behind the bar and knowing how to serve drinks and provide a cheery welcome.
As I help pack 10 years of a life into a removal van, I’m reminded yet again that it takes a special person to run a pub.
Complex
I know there are two sides to a that situation like this. I know Valentine’s situation is not the worst example of the practices that have made Enterprise so hated by so many publicans, and that up to a point, neither side wanted this to happen.
But I also know this isn’t a “failed or failing publican looking for someone to blame”, as Ted Tuppen recently dismissed opponents of the pubcos.
The case is complex, and legally sensitive. But when this can happen to an instinctive publican in a busy, popular pub, I don’t see how anyone can claim the current system is working just fine and doesn’t need urgent reform.
Enterprise was sounding out new tenants to take over the Alma even as the company’s bailiffs were changing the locks. If they offer the new tenant exactly the same terms they offered Valentine, and if that person is able to make a living from the pub on those terms, I’ll stand corrected.
But right now, it seems obvious that it’s the pubco model that is failed or failing. Not the people whose lives are destroyed by it.