The drive for profit is killing pubs

I once lived briefly just off Battersea Square in South London. It was a charming cobbled space flanked on all sides by elegant Georgian terraces. Trees and benches were scattered through the middle of the square, and flower baskets hung from the old-fashioned lampposts.

It was a perfect little spot, and obviously a desirable place to live.

There was just one problem: because it was so lovely, every single commercial property on the square — with the exception of one Italian restaurant and a fairly crap All Bar One  — was an estate agent. As a result, Battersea Square felt like a dead, empty, hollow shell, with no atmosphere, no charm, no appeal, no reason whatsoever to linger there.

The property companies had destroyed the very thing they had come there to sell.

Desirable​

You see this a lot around London these days. Anywhere that has a quirky charm to it becomes desirable, so it becomes gentrified, and soon it looks exactly the same as everywhere else: the difference that made it attractive to people has disappeared.

I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago when I read that the Black Lion — a 300-year-old coaching inn in Bayswater, West London, had been sold for £27m.

The pub — owned by Spirit — was first listed as an alehouse in 1704. It served as a coaching inn throughout the eighteenth century, a stopping point on the road to Bristol and the New World. In 1803 it was used as the registration house for the Paddington Volunteers, formed to fight off the threat of Napoleon’s invasion.

Soon, it will be a block of ‘luxury apartments’.

Anger​

The story of pubs closing is a familiar one, but this one filled me with a particular sense of dread and anger.

I won’t pretend the Black Lion is a great pub: like many of London’s historic boozers, it is run by people who simply go through the motions. Customer reviews online describe it as a typical pub, nothing special, with an uninteresting range of drinks and shabby décor. When you have the right location and history, you don’t really have to put much effort into making the place special: despite not being very good, the Black Lion made £700,000 profit last year.

It’s this that horrifies me the most: we’re always hearing that pubs which are no longer viable must bow to the inevitable and make way for housing or a Tesco Metro.

This pub makes almost three quarters of a million pounds a year. If it were treated with the respect it deserves, it could make much more. But for some people, that’s not enough.

Miserable​

Some commentators argue that if a pub could be making more money as something else, then it is unrealistic, even unfair, for us to argue that it should remain a pub.

I think Battersea Square shows the fallacy of that argument.

If we were to consider every property purely in terms of its maximum financial value, we would have no schools, no hospitals, no community spaces, no green belt, no parks. Britain would be one gigantic shopping mall where we existed not as citizens, but merely as consumers.

It terrifies me that the Foxtons and Tescos of this world really don’t see a problem with that.

We live in a world where money —profit — is regarded as the most important consideration above all others. I don’t like that, but it’s reality. But I worry that we’re heading into something even more miserable — where profit is not just the most important consideration, but the only consideration.

Three centuries of history means nothing to Spirit Pub Company (who ignored requests for a chat about this story). Neither does the fact that when people move into these luxury flats, they’ll be living in a place that’s increasingly soulless.

Protection​

Sure money is important. But money doesn’t care for people. Money doesn’t help those in need, those who are lonely or can’t keep up. Money doesn’t bring people together and build communities. Money doesn’t laugh or joke, or make sure you’re OK if you haven’t been seen for a few days. Money doesn’t give a shit about anything other than money.

Pubs, and the people who occupy them, do. If none of that is important, fine, let’s sell all the pubs and redevelop the whole country into luxury flats to be sold as investments to foreign oligarchs.

But if we are to say that, much as we love money, there are other considerations that need to be borne in mind if we want a society worth living in, perhaps it’s time pubs were given greater statutory protection.

Otherwise, as the famous quote from Hilaire Belloc a century ago has it, we might as well drown our sorry selves.