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Demise of the Pub

The Last Whites of the East End

This post by @Cold_Collation got me thinking. When I moved to Eccles 20+ years ago, there were (IIRC) 57 pubs in the town. There’s not much more than a dozen now. I used to crawl the town centre with mates but I haven’t been there for ages and the demise of pubs is shocking. There is a ‘posh designer’ suburb up the road that has a preponderance of bar/café’s serving expensive bottled beer and cocktails. Most of their clientele aren’t locals (they’re all in the single remaining proper boozer) they taxi in from Salford for a ‘posh night out’.

What has caused this decline? I agree with @Cold_Collation that there’s a massive problem with the Pubcos – my local is Punch owned and only safe because it’s listed and none of the developers who have seen it have been interested – but, along with all the other Punch pubs, it’s permanently on the market.

Is it that the ‘wrong’ type of people want to become licencees (and are being granted licences)? Has the smoking ban been as big a factor as I think it has?

Is there any way to revive what was once a cornerstone of our communities?
 
You'll soon have @RoyalGreenJacket on here blaming all brown skinned people!
It's a sign of the times, prices for alcohol are cheaper in the supermarkets, very few pubs are the social magnet that they used to be due to the movement of people in the area. I grew up with all of my drinking partners when I was a youngster but we've all moved on now.

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The Last Whites of the East End

This post by @Cold_Collation got me thinking. When I moved to Eccles 20+ years ago, there were (IIRC) 57 pubs in the town. There’s not much more than a dozen now. I used to crawl the town centre with mates but I haven’t been there for ages and the demise of pubs is shocking. There is a ‘posh designer’ suburb up the road that has a preponderance of bar/café’s serving expensive bottled beer and cocktails. Most of their clientele aren’t locals (they’re all in the single remaining proper boozer) they taxi in from Salford for a ‘posh night out’.

What has caused this decline? I agree with @Cold_Collation that there’s a massive problem with the Pubcos – my local is Punch owned and only safe because it’s listed and none of the developers who have seen it have been interested – but, along with all the other Punch pubs, it’s permanently on the market.

Is it that the ‘wrong’ type of people want to become licencees (and are being granted licences)? Has the smoking ban been as big a factor as I think it has?

Is there any way to revive what was once a cornerstone of our communities?

They've evolved. Stupid old landlords and pubs with surly locals who think they own the place are disappearing all right but there's plenty of boozers in Manchester. I must say, bury is shite, but get out to Rammy and all is very much alive and well.
 
Tax/duty, cheaper booze elsewhere, drink driving laws, smoking, breweries/pubcos bleeding tenants dry, minimum wage increases.

The pub has been battered and raped from every angle. I'm surprised some have lasted as long as this to be honest.
 
@incendiarycutlery Yes - agreed - but why are the lads in their twenties and thirties not doing the crawls as I used to? I'm still going to the pub regularly (off there in a mo) but you'd be hard pressed to do a crawl in town now - most of the pubs are either shut or pound shops. I hope it wasn't just me who's to blame :(
 
people have got more and different things to do that don't revolve around going out. Video games and their massive surge in popularity have been blamed for part of it - whereas it used to be seen as a very minority pursuit, if you were to announce to your mates you were going to spend the weekend sat in your pants playing Call Of Duty these days, a lot of them would either be doing the very same thing or jealous of you for being able to in the first place.
 
I can go down Aldis and buy a couple of bottles of Merlot Cabernet Sauvignon for less than the price of two glasses of wine in my local. So why wouldn't I?
 
We drank ourselves stupid, and made a nuisance of ourselves for 400 years. A cynic may think that as a control measure, our betters could tax the stuff at an eye watering level until landlords couldn't make much profit from it. Bring in a monopolies policy that stopped big Brewers having a holding stock of more than two hundred on their portfolio, killing their ability to provide their own houses with mass cheaply produced beer, and finally reinforce the smoking ban far more than our continental cousins and hey presto........
 
They've evolved. Stupid old landlords and pubs with surly locals who think they own the place are disappearing all right but there's plenty of boozers in Manchester. I must say, bury is shite, but get out to Rammy and all is very much alive and well.
But people from Ramsbottom have only just sussed out the opposable thumb thingy, so it's still all a bit novel to them :)

Seriously, yes, Rammy is what I think of as a typical town with a decent selection of good pubs - is it just the outer edges of the cities that are suffering as people either flock to the centre of the conurbation or sit at home in their Y-fronts like @maguire ?

(and yes, agrred totally - Bury is shite)
 
@incendiarycutlery Yes - agreed - but why are the lads in their twenties and thirties not doing the crawls as I used to? I'm still going to the pub regularly (off there in a mo) but you'd be hard pressed to do a crawl in town now - most of the pubs are either shut or pound shops. I hope it wasn't just me who's to blame :(

Because it's £3+ for a pint in most places while I can five good beers from Lidl for a fiver with change left over. I love drinking in pubs but I can't afford it, the music's usually rubbish and so loud you can't hear the person next to you and you can't have a smoke so if anyone wants one, then you've got to shift out of the table/seats you've somehow managed to grab and lose them if you want to continue the conversation.

If the beer was cheaper and you could have a good place to sit and talk where you could hear everyone around the table, then I'd go out to pubs more often.
 
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