Say goodbye to pubs

British pubs are in crisis — they sold seven million fewer pints of beer last year than they did in 1979. Some of you might cheer if that figure represented a decline in alcoholic consumption, but it does not: more people are drinking to excess (and starting at a younger age) than ever before. The decline in pubs is to do with three things: the smoking ban, a fraying in the old notion of community, and as a result of Happy Hours and drinks promotions, which have transformed the average British pub from a haven of smoked glass, polished brass and mahogany into blaring dumps filled from one end to the other with quiz machines, karaoke stages, and drunken teenagers shouting at each other over lurid drinks.

George Orwell once described a warm beer and a country pub as being among the essential flavours of England. Nobody would claim that now… I’ve gone from being someone who stopped in at a pub several times a week when I was younger — and practically living there when I was a student — to hating pubs. Many of the establishments are so pressed for custom that they will do anything to fill their bar — mainly selling toxic drinks in devastating quantities to kids who consider a good night out to be one that ends in copious vomiting…

It would be hard to convince anyone that the pub was once the premiere venue for literary and journalistic life in this country, for intelligent argument and amorous adventure, for meeting with the unknown. Not one person under 40 that I know met their partner in a pub, or got their present job via a pub assignation. Though quite a number of them could say that the last time they were exposed to violence was in a pub during “happy hour”.

Excerpted from a comment by Andrew O’Hagan in ‘The Daily Telegraph’