Locals are doing it for themselves
Something extraordinary happened yesterday. At 11am, against a background of pubs closing all over England (the CAMRA estimate is now 40 a week) – closing as implacably as the lights the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey saw going out all over Europe in 1914 – the Old Red Lion was back in business in the Northamptonshire village of Litchborough. After two years, the blank steel shutters have been taken down from the windows: a pub has opened in England. And it's a little moment of social history.
For this is something none of us ever thought we would see, given that what is happening elsewhere has been relentless, and at its most cruel in villages. The school goes, that is usually the first absence; then the shop closes, and, with it, the post office; the bus service thins to a dawn trickle, and the church becomes part of a wistful little empire of four, five or six churches on which a vicar calls like a flying doctor. Finally the pub shuts. By then the process is well advanced, but with that it is complete. A community that may be 1,000 years old stops being a community, for it has no meeting place. A village has become a place where a man grows old among strangers.
As an old postmaster told me: "I see them drive out in the morning, and I see them come home at night. But what they do, and where they go to, I haven't a clue." The public perception is that all this is down to the closure of the pubs. You will have heard or read that half the villages of England are now without pubs for the first time since the Norman Conquest or Domesday, although nobody, not even CAMRA, knows who came up with this fact.
But the pub may have closed in your village, in the villages you drive through, and it has certainly happened in mine: for 10 years I was a regular at the Old Red Lion. The pub closed in 2008 due to the ill health of its tenant, the late Tom O'Shea.
It was then part of a brewery chain, which advertised it as a tenancy, until, when this failed, they put it on the market for a staggering £600,000, which would be its value as a private development. But in a village without any other social amenity, planning permission was refused. This is what usually happens. The result is a stand-off between the planners and the brewery until one or the other blinks, or the building becomes dangerous. But occasionally there are little lights in the darkness. At the Old Crown at Hesket Newmarket in Cumbria, 100 people got together and set up the first pub co-operative with its own brewery. At the Dabbling Duck in Norfolk the council itself bought the pub, then sold it on at a small profit.
In Litchborough something even more remarkable happened. As the months passed, and there was no sign of the Old Red Lion reopening, a despairing local housewife, Sarah Hobbs, opened a sort of pub-in-exile. Watched by worried check-out girls, she bought up every wine bottle on offer at Tesco, and, with beer from a one-man brewery that had been set up in the village's small industrial estate, got herself a licence and once a month opened up the village hall. The cost, after some debate with a bemused committee whose only dealings in the past had been with the WI, was £20, electricity £6 extra. There, like White Russian refugees in 1920s Paris, the regulars of the Old Red Lion met again. To the best of my knowledge, that has happened nowhere else. But now all that comes to an end – dissolved, just as young army officers might have promised to dissolve their junta after a coup.
drive from www.independent.co.uk