Britain is littered with pubs. Thousands and thousands and thousands of them all over the place. From the Red Lion to the Mill to the Golden Oak to the Bell it is the national symbol and you will see them in every street, village and in parts of the countryside that really you would not expect to see them. Unlike the more traditional landmarks such as Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and the like they will differ in presentation, size and colour but they are unfailingly recognised as what represents the face of Britain.
To go to the pub is the national past time. This is what people do here. It is their social activity, probably more than any other nation of people. And pubs are dying. More every day you see old pubs which have probably poured beer for centuries being converted into homes, flats, offices, curry restaurants, night clubs and worse of worse being boarded up and left to rot. The industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people and generates billions is, it is said, going through its worst ever trading period. So how can this be? This in a country of a growing population? I ask these questions not because I think you’re interested but rather because owning / running a pub is what I will be doing now that I am here. In a small English village, in the tail of a recession; I must be friggen mad! So am I?
For nearly ten years in the 90’s we ran pubs. Initially it was just me, then my significantly better half joined me and we went on for a number of years to run successful growth operations before heading off to corporate management. It was a different time then, money was plentiful, it was a bit before people started travelling more freely and widely and if you drank Malibu and coke you were looked upon as a bit odd and maybe showing off a bit.
How it worked then was quite simple. The majority of the pubs were owned and either managed, tenanted by or leased by the brewery. There were a number of major breweries around and they generally owned the land and the buildings of these pubs and supplied their beer to them (they had estates worth billions and billions of pounds). The good pubs they kept as managed which meant they made more money and they employed a bunch of area managers to go out and make sure that their pubs were running to budget. Back in those days we – and I was one of those area managers – took our job seriously, working extreme hours but being reasonably rewarded. We made the effort to understand the town in which we traded, we tried to employ people fit for the pub and we had a budget to ensure that our pubs looked good most of the time. Our bosses had worked their way up through the trade and were themselves experts in it. It was before the days of a degree being everything. We understood the dynamics of the trade and we did it by choice.
It seems, and it is early days, that a lot of that has changed with the bigger companies. The landscape as I knew it has changed somewhat. The big companies with their billions worth of land have got themselves into trouble and have been forced to split and restructure, some disappearing all together. With all their degrees and smartness, with all their money they forgot which side of their bread was buttered. Their previously reasonably successful and rent free estate should have been an outlet and a cash generator for their beers, which they brewed, for hundreds of years to come like it has been for hundreds of years already. They forgot that regardless of their wealth the whole circle depended on the simple customers, who were made to feel welcome, walking through the door. They forgot to find the best people possible because they were trying to cut cost instead of trying to boost turnover. They forgot to make their managers and tenant’s important people in their company. And consequently they have fallen apart. And all this in the name of the next merger. All this in the name of a better share price. And all this activity has taken the life from thousands of pubs across the country. It has cost jobs. It has bought stress. It has also bought opportunity, especially for smaller operators wanting to make good money from a handful of pubs.
And this is why I am here. There is opportunity, both for us as a family to start over, and for this type of pub in this village. This pub, some of it still visible, dates back to the 16th century. The history in this building is immense and it has been stripped back to the past to high light this. It is a well-worn traditional pub that believe it or not is immeasurably different to the other five pubs in this village. When it is finished – and the work is still a month from being so – it will be the flagship of this small brewery (www.joulesbrewery.co.uk). Or we will die trying to make it so!
The sad thing is, just around the corner from us is another pub of similar age and with comparative history, only this one is owned by some faceless pub company. It has been renovated to hide all things old. They have ripped the soul out of it. And there is not a soul in it.
Lots to do in this next month. And do it we shall. Until tomorrow. Hopefully!
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