From The Guardian Tim Minogue The Guardian, Friday March 23 2007

Last orders
In Lewes, East Sussex, regulars are boycotting their favourite pub because the owners have stopped selling their favourite beer. Should we care? Yes, says Tim Minogue, because it highlights how big corporations are destroying local pubs across the country

Eight-thirty on a Saturday night and the pubs are filling up in Lewes. Th Elephant and Castle is packed with men watching rugby on the big screen. mixed crowd is ready to boogie at the John Harvey Tavern, where loca Madness-inspired band the Ska Toons are tuning up. Aficionados of real ale and roll-ups are settling down in the Gardeners Arms. And the youth are getting stuck into th lager at the noisy Rainbow

There's a pub to suit most tastes in the East Sussex town. But the most popular of the lot, the Lewes Arms, which is normally packed on a Saturday, is all but empty. The only regulars here tonight are standing outside in the drizzle with placards and leaflets, politely requesting potential customers to boycott both the 18th-century pub and its owner since 1998, Greene King plc.

The main room, with its bare boards, sash windows, open fireplace, high-backed settle, dartboard and notice declaring that anyone using a mobile phone must buy a drink for everyone in the pub, is deserted. So is the backroom with its old photos and naval memorabilia. Only the tiny front bar, with a window giving on to the lane leading to the town's Norman castle, is occupied - half-a-dozen loud characters who seem to have been there some time. One spots my notebook and bellows: "Wanker!" The thirsty stranger might conclude it is better to go elsewhere.

Hundreds of regulars already have. They have been boycotting the 220-year-old pub since December 11, when Greene King, despite a petition signed by 1,200 locals, including Lib Dem MP Norman Baker, withdrew Lewesians' favourite tipple, Harveys Bitter, from sale.

Harveys has been brewed a few hundred metres away, beside the River Ouse, by an independent family firm since 1790. It was voted best bitter in 2005 and 2006 at the Great British Beer Festival. In the Lewes Arms, as a "guest beer", it outsold Greene King's own IPA, brewed in faraway Bury St Edmunds, Suff olk, at least four-toone. But GK, as supplier as well as retailer, made more from every pint of IPA sold than Harveys. Get rid of Harveys, the thinking went, and the locals, after a bit of grumbling, would switch to IPA and GK would make more money. But it hasn't worked out that way. According to the trade paper the Morning Advertiser, the pub has lost 90% of its business since the boycott, which was 100 days old on Wednesday, and now sells very few pints of anything. At lunchtimes and weekday evenings, hours go by when no one at all crosses the threshold.

But this dispute is not just about beer. Across Britain the traditional "community" local is under threat as never before. According to the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra), 56 pubs close in Britain every month, most of them urban locals. Camra's head of research, Iain Loe, says: "The bricks and mortar are often worth more, in the short term, for conversion to flats than the place is as a going concern, even though it may have been making money for 200 years and would continue to do so. Then people move into the new flats and find there's no community, no focus, which the local would have provided."

Ownership of pubs is becoming concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The giant "pubcos", Punch Taverns and Enterprise Inns, own some 9,000 outlets each, while Greene King itself has more than 2,600. "If a smaller pub doesn't fit into their business model they will sell it to a developer to be converted into fl ats or a restaurant without a second thought," says Loe. Last autumn Greene King sold 158 pubs, many of which were destined for redevelopment.

Pub owners are also worried about the smoking ban that comes into force in Wales on April 2 and in England on July 1, and are seeking to maximise profits before it kicks in. "Wet" pubs, like the Lewes Arms, where most of the turnover comes from selling drink, are supposed to be particularly vulnerable to loss of trade, based on the theory that smokers are also likely to be the heaviest drinkers, and will indulge both habits at home if they cannot do so in the pub. Research by Camra, however, indicates only 3% of regular pub-goers say they will stay at home because of the ban. The other 97% - 6.2 million people - say they are more likely to visit the pub after it comes into force. Another 840,000 who currently don't visit pubs because they don't like smoky atmospheres say they will after July 1. Greene King intends to encourage them, according to its chief executive, Rooney Anand, by pumping "industrialscale air fresheners" through pubs as part of what it calls "Operation Clean and Fresh".

The Lewes Arms is - or was - the community pub par excellence. Martin Crees, one of the mainstays of the Friends of Lewes Arms "vigil" outside, says the pub is "like a communal sitting room ... there's no juke box, no TV, no fruit machines. It's a conversation pub." Mobiles are banned. Valmai Goodyear, 53, a regular for 35 years, says: "It's the pub where you go to meet friends. As a woman I've always been comfortable going in by myself and knowing I'll meet someone worth talking to. I like the continuity. My son took his first solid food in the Lewes Arms - the corner of a beer mat. Now he's 21 and captains the pub cricket team. It'll be tragic if Greene King destroys that sense of community." One octogenarian who remembers celebrating the coronation in the pub is boycotting it after more than 60 years as a regular.

As befits a community pub, the Lewes Arms has been host to many clubs and societies, most of which have taken themselves elsewhere, including angling, chess, cribbage, Scrabble and darts clubs, and three cricket teams. The regulars organise their own sports day, harvest festival and panto. All this character seems in danger of being lost. Goodyear says: "The most important thing about it is that all the activities have been devised and run by the locals themselves. They haven't been imposed by managers 200 miles away deciding, say, that because it's St Patrick's Day all the staff are going to dress as leprechauns in standard uniforms issued from headquarters."

This is the crucial issue for the locals keeping vigil outside - independence and local character versus the corporate mindset, standardised products and industrial-scale air fresheners. "In the past every place had its own beer and its own taste," says radio producer and Lewes resident Dilly Barlow. "Now Greene King wants to force everyone to accept its taste." This seems to be the key issue for Greene King, too. The locals hoped that, despite ignoring their letter-writing campaign and petition, GK would understand the depth of feeling when the boycott bit into its takings, and gracefully restore the Harveys. But Greene King doesn't seem to do graceful. Baker, who has tried to broker a solution, says: "Greene King has conceded that the boycott has been effective and that takings are substantially down. I have told it that this is not going to go away, and that its reputation is suffering. It seems it doesn't want to lose face. But if it restored the beer, or sold the pub to Harveys or someone else who would run it as before, I would be the first to congratulate it."

Elsewhere Greene King has annoyed locals in London, Kent, Cambridgeshire, Hampshire, Warwickshire and the Isle of Wight by replacing traditional painted inn signs with its corporate logo, although some have been restored after protests. In Wantage, Oxfordshire, the Shoulder of Mutton free house has had threats of legal action from GK for displaying a "Greene Kingfree zone" banner on its gable end. Perhaps they need to lighten up a little in Bury St Edmunds.

What has happened in Lewes has come as no surprise to regulars at pubs in Nottingham, where Greene King took over the 170-year-old Hardys and Hansons Kimberley brewery in June last year, plus 268 pubs, including the medieval Olde Trip to Jerusalem, built into the walls of Nottingham Castle. Within months it had closed the brewery, made 80 workers redundant, and moved production to Bury St Edmunds, despite a petition signed by thousands. Camra's Nottingham branch has complained to the city's trading standards department. " It is still selling 'Kimberley' ale in Nottingham pubs, with a picture of the old brewery on the pump," says local spokesman Andrew Ludlow. "How can it be the same product if it is brewed elsewhere with different ingredients? Someone going into a pub in Nottingham may have a choice of Ruddles, Kimberley, Old Speckled Hen and Greene King IPA. But they are all brewed at the same giant plant in Suffolk." He points to the folly, at a time of worry about carbon emissions, of closing local breweries and trucking in faux "local" ales from hundreds of "beer miles" away.

The irony is that "Greede King", as its critics have named it, was itself once a small independent brewery but grew into a FTSE 250-listed company worth more than £1bn, largely because of the success of the real-ale revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Benjamin Greene founded the Westgate brewery in 1799, just nine years after John Harvey set up shop in Lewes. Greene's company merged with another Bury St Edmunds brewery, Kings, in 1887, to form GK. The company has been listed on the stock exchange since 1955. Last year it made an operating profit of £191m on turnover of £818m - both substantially up on the previous year - and now employs some 16,700 people. GK still brews good "real" ale, but over the past 10 years has swallowed smaller breweries and pub companies until it now owns 2,680 pubs and is Britain's third-biggest national brewer.

Takeover by Greene King usually spells death for local brewers. In 1999 it absorbed Morlands of Abingdon, closed the brewery and moved production of famous names such as Old Speckled Hen and Ruddles to Bury St Edmunds (or "BSE" as GK-haters call it). The Ridleys family brewery in Essex was acquired and closed in July 2005; Hardys and Hansons followed. Other acquisitions have included the Magic Pub Co, the Hungry Horse fast-food outlets, Old English Inns, Morrell's of Oxford, and the Laurel Pub Company. One morsel digested along the way was the 43-pub estate of a defunct Sussex brewery, Beards, acquired for £12.2m in 1998. In that year all Beards' 43 pubs sold Harveys; the Lewes Arms was the last to lose it.

Meanwhile Greene King's PR talks up the traditional community pub. It sponsors the Perfect Pub award and last year hosted the launch of the Publican trade paper's Proud of Pubs campaign at the House of Commons. Chief executive Anand, who came to Greene King from the Sara Lee cake company, says GK is committed to keeping pubs at the heart of local communities. "It's about time society started standing up for pubs, and recognising them as one of our nation's greatest assets," he declares. Marketing director Fiona Hope, formerly employed by Coca-Cola, says: "The pub and the pint are great institutions that play a positive role in millions of people's lives." The company has launched a related "I Pledge Allegiance" campaign which, explains Ms Hope, "gives pub-goers a communal voice in support of great pubs and great beer ... People who care about their local." Down in Sussex, hundreds of people who care very deeply about their local are not impressed.

I ask Greene King whether the company would reconsider the ban on Harveys in the face of the Lewes Arms boycott and what it has to say to those who argue that a company that claims to care about pubs and communities should take more notice of its customers. Mark Angela, managing director of the Greene King Pub Company, says in a written statement: "All over the country, brewers sell their own beer in their own pubs - it's a practice as old as the pub itself. We recognise that some of our customers at the Lewes Arms don't accept this practice, but we are proud of our wonderful beers and proud to sell them. Greene King is one of the biggest supporters of community pubs in this country. Last year we invested nearly £40m on improvements to our pubs. At Greene King, we spend a great deal of time listening to our customers. The direct feedback we receive on a daily basis is central to the way that we shape our service and our pubs. We have been serving communities by running great pubs for more than 200 years and intend to carry on doing so for another 200, whatever challenges are thrown our way." Hmmm. It sounds as if Angela is politely telling the people of Lewes to get stuffed.

Meanwhile, during an hour with the Saturday night vigil outside the pub, four people come out - and only one goes in. Three others go elsewhere after talking to the pickets. Two students, Olga from the Czech Republic and Gloria from Spain, study the Friends' leafl ets. "You mean, they won't let you drink the beer you want in your own local pub?" asks Gloria. "These people, they must be crazy."