The Village Pub

I was listening to a radio programme about the demise of the village pub, which is usually the cue for a familiar round of sighing, nostalgia and finger pointing. Big business. Supermarkets. Wetherspoons. Councils. The government. Anyone, really, except the people doing the sighing.

What we are repeatedly told is that this collapse is sudden. A shock. A crisis. As if the pub trade was healthy until very recently and then, without warning, fell off a cliff. That simply is not true. This has been happening at a steady, predictable pace for forty years. Not a collapse, a thinning. Decade by decade, habit by habit, the sums quietly stopped working.

The problem with most of the lamenting is that it treats the pub as something that was taken from us, rather than something we quietly stopped using. Ask the average mourner when they last went into their village pub and the answer is often two years ago, possibly more, usually followed by a justification involving work, health, driving, the weather, or “it just wasn’t what it used to be”. All fair enough. But a business cannot survive on fond memories and annual Christmas lunches.

Before Covid, we went out to a pub once a week for a meal. Nothing fancy, just a routine. Covid intervened, the habit was broken, and when restrictions disappeared we simply never resumed it. Not out of principle. It just did not restart. What we did notice, however, was that we were about £150 a week better off. That is more than my monthly diesel spend on the car. Once you see that written down, nostalgia has a harder job competing with arithmetic.

The same forces took out the village shop and the attached post office. They were never really commercial enterprises in the modern sense. They were social infrastructure disguised as retail. Once people drove to supermarkets, commuted out of the village, ordered online and did their banking on a phone, the logic collapsed. What was left was nostalgia with overheads.

Ironically, many pubs tried to absorb those losses as a survival mechanism. A corner becomes a shop. The snug becomes a post office counter. The pub quietly turns itself into a Swiss Army knife of rural services, not because it wants to, but because someone has to host what remains of communal life. At this rate, they may as well double up as churches too. Attendance there has been falling for decades, and at least the pub already has seating, heating, and a working collection plate.

This is the point where it is worth asking what does work, because some pubs are not just surviving, they are doing perfectly well. The pattern is fairly consistent. Successful pubs pick a lane and stay in it. They stop pretending they are essential infrastructure and accept that they are leisure businesses. If they do food, they do it properly, with short menus and competence rather than ambition. If they focus on drink, they do it deliberately and cheaply enough to matter. They understand that reviews now replace habit, and that one bad meal does more damage than ten good pints ever did.

They also accept that routine local trade has gone and replace it with destination custom. Walkers, cyclists, tourists, weekenders. Parking helps. So does being on a route, having rooms upstairs, serving coffee in the morning, or working the building harder in other ways. They control costs ruthlessly, limit opening hours when it makes sense, and design themselves around the demographics they actually have, not the village population of 1985.

Wetherspoons gets blamed a lot, and it deserves some of it. It is not really a pub, it is big business selling alcohol efficiently. It recalibrated what people think a pint should cost, and once that happens the local publican is finished. But even that misses the point. Wetherspoons did not kill the village pub. It merely accelerated and exposed a decline already well under way.

Demographics did the heavier lifting. Younger people drink far less and rarely see the pub as a default social space. Older people drink differently, less often, and prefer the comfort of home. Add in commuting, housing churn, second homes and the disappearance of people who live and work in the same place, and the steady midweek trade evaporates. The pub was built on routine. We now live on choice.

Covid relief muddied the waters further. A lot of pubs were not saved so much as frozen. Furlough, grants, VAT cuts and rate relief paused the decline but did not reverse it. When that support ended, exactly as scheduled, the reaction was framed as a sudden betrayal. It was nothing of the sort. The clock simply restarted. Emergency support quietly became an expectation, and the return of normal arithmetic felt like an ambush.

Cheap supermarket booze finished the job. Alcohol became a loss leader, sold at prices pubs cannot legally match. People quite rationally drank at home, or drank before going out, or stopped going out altogether. The pub was left trying to sell atmosphere at a price people no longer recognise as reasonable. By the time anyone noticed what was being lost, the behaviour had already shifted.

Food was supposed to be the salvation. Instead, many pubs started serving frankly shit food. Not cheap, not good, and not memorable in a good way. Microwaved mediocrity at restaurant prices. Once you have a couple of bad meals, you stop trying. Meanwhile, stand-alone restaurants quietly disappeared, squeezed by costs and the collapse of routine eating out. Pubs stole their lunch, but only because the restaurant had already left the table.

At this point, it is worth noticing who actually buys a lot of failing pubs. Developers. Especially the ones with decent car parks. A pub with land is not a community asset, it is a planning opportunity. The decline does not need to be dramatic. It just needs to be allowed to continue until redevelopment becomes “inevitable”.

I am part of this too. I now only go to pubs when I am away on a short break, and not for the drink. I go for the food and the atmosphere, after checking the menu and the reviews. That is not how village pubs were meant to work, but it is how they are now consumed.

So when the village pub finally closes, the grief feels real but oddly hollow. We did not lose it overnight. We opted out of it slowly, over several decades, politely and with good reasons. The padlock on the door just makes the long decision visible.