This may not resonate in America but the British Pub is a social institution. There is much agonising over its demise over recent years with thousands of pubs shutting down. An excerpt from a new study tells its own tail. Smokers are using there feet in not going to them anymore. CULTURAL CHANGE A common reply to the question of why so many pubs are closing is that society has simply moved on. People have warm, comfortable homes and would prefer to share a bottle of wine in front of the television than spend the evening in the pub. The shift from the pub to the home and other venues has been a long and gradual one. In the late nineteenth century, music hall, day trips on the railway, dog-racing and professional football challenged the pub’s virtual monopoly as a working class leisure activity. Cinema, bingo, radio, television and the internet followed in the twentieth century. Reviewing The Pub and the People in 1943 George Orwell wrote: ‘the whole trend of the age is away from creative communal amusements and towards solitary mechanical ones. The pub, with its elaborate social ritual, its animated conversations and - at any rate in the North of England - its songs and week-end comedians, is gradually replaced by the passive, drug-like pleasures of the cinema and the radio. This is only a cause for rejoicing if one believes, as a few Temperance fanatics still do, that people go to pubs to just get drunk’ (Orwell, 1943). Some of the cultural changes that have damaged the pub trade are the consequence of economic change - better domestic living conditions, a shrinking of the working class and the decline of heavy industry, for example. Others, such as the mild taboo against lunchtime drinking and the firmer taboo against drink-driving, are the result of changing attitudes. Still others are the result of changing tastes. This analysis of the pub trade accepts that there is a secular decline in pub numbers that is, in part, due to changing social norms. Nonetheless, even assuming that a certain number of pub closures are inevitable, the post-2006 decline has been exceptional and cannot plausibly be explained by gradual cultural change alone. As Figure 1 shows, if the secular decline in pub numbers between 1980 and 2006 (dotted line) had continued, we would expect to see approximately 54,000 pubs in business in 2013. In reality, there were only 48,000. We therefore need an explanation for why 6,000 more pubs closed that would be expected using this (arguably pessimistic) model. From the graph below the decline should have followed the dotted line, but the introduction of the smoking ban in 2007 saw the decline fall through the floor. Figure 1: Number of pubs in the UK (1980-2013)
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 18:06:56 +0000
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