I wrote last year about how worried I was about Britain’s rural economy and some of you wrote back and kindly asked what I thought we should do.
The honest answer that has become clear to me over the past twelve months is that the most important and fragile thing we can do is keep the village pub open. I’ve thought about it almost every day since spring. So allow me to share this week’s personal column. I think it’s the right week for it.
The pub I am writing about, and yes of course it is a specific pub, is in a small village in Suffolk, on a road where the satnav is. It has been around in some form since the 17th century. The current building is largely Georgian in style, with a Victorian extension and a 1990s kitchen which I would generously describe as character building. The current tenant has been there for eleven years. The previous tenant for twenty-three.
By the current trade body’s definition it is a “community run” pub. About 60 percent of trade is beverages; 30 percent is food; The rest are the upstairs rooms converted in the 1990s for the kind of weekend Londoners we used to call “townies” and who we now call, less affectionately, “Zoom refugees.” It employs four full-time and seven part-time employees. The full-time staff include the chef, who came from Hackney during the pandemic and never left, and a young 22-year-old who started as a glass collector five years ago and has just completed his apprenticeship as a cellar master. The part-time workers are mostly women from the village, two of whom would work in another country in a primary school that closed in 2019.
It is the wettest, most stubborn piece of British social infrastructure I know of and it finds itself, with the current appreciation in interest rates, in a cycle of kitchen appliances and replacements that no one saw coming, and in a year of unusually aggressive energy contracts that is about £42,000 a year away from solvency. This is not a private detail. The innkeeper told me so himself when I called him on Monday.
There are no shops in our village. There hasn’t been a post office for fourteen years. The bus runs twice a week. The elementary school permanently lost its 6th grade cohort in 2019. The doctor’s office closed to new patient registration in 2018 and is now more of a dispensary than a clinic. The church holds services every two weeks. The mobile library, which stopped here on a Tuesday afternoon, was dissolved in the 2022 funding round. The pub is literally what the rest of the village is now.
Should it close, the geography of village life would not be replaced by something else. There is no shop that is willing to take on the “community” function. There is no council house with a working kitchen, the Aga was lost in 2017 and the trustees never raised the £6,200 to replace it. The Cubs, who use the back room of the pub on Wednesdays, would, on previous form, migrate to a town six miles away and, on previous form, shy away. Sunday dinners, which represent the most important weekly social contact for an unmarried woman of 78, would not take place. The wake, and we had four this year in a village of 273 people, would have to be held in someone’s living room.
As I write this, I am aware that big city eyebrows are being raised. The landscape has been groaning since time immemorial, says the eyebrow, and the landscape is no longer what it once was. Both are technically true. They are also excuses. The country is fundamentally different from any other part of England in one respect: when its institutions disappear, there are almost invariably no replacements. In London, in one square mile there are three public houses, four cafes, a few pubs that aren’t very good, several restaurants and a handful of community spaces that do roughly the same social work. Not Suffolk. The English village, almost unique in the British Isles, has housed all of its community infrastructure in a single building, and that building is increasingly the pub.
What would I do accordingly? Almost everything I have already suggested in this magazine: VAT of 12.5 percent for hospitality; a community pub-specific prize multiplier; the “asset of community value” reform, which shifted the burden of proof to developers seeking a flat-pack style listed pub. And something else I’ve been quiet about: a small, ring-fenced national fund, perhaps £150m a year, to provide low-interest loans for local authority buyouts of pubs in areas where closure is the only alternative. We have such a fund for cinemas. We have a much larger one for football. Nowhere in our policy do we have one for the rural pub.
In two or three years we will know whether we have kept these places open. I’ll stay in Suffolk as long as it’s open. This also applies to the village in its current form. Quite simply, the country would be better suited for this.
