Camberwell Online 31.01.12

http://www.camberwellonline.co.uk/2012/01/the-evening-economy/#comment-463862


Kuki hair and poodle parlour are outside of my orbit. BUT the rest:

It’s SLA167 and it stands for Sophia Lauren’s Ass and street number of the shop.

If Coal is bought from Casa it will NOT be good value. But may well be convenient to the amateur home fire raiser. How could it be good value from a Architectural Salvage place? Matt has to make a living. Innit.

M&M fish bar on Denmark Road. Have the chips ‘well done’ and it’s as good a fish and chips as you’d get anywhere in these fair isles. And great value.

Spent the day in Brighton Friends’ Meeting House rubbing shoulders with the Eco Innovations crew from Farnham doing workshops around sustainable enterprise.

Then hot footed back to London to the Maharaja Tandoori on Denman Street, right off Piccadilly, for an evening of the new opening for The Restaurant Inspector. By a circuitous route four of my photographs, framed, now decorate the interior as part of the famed Fernando Peire’s makeover of the old interior.

Was good fun, long day.

Facebook Licensees Supporting Licensees:

Jacqui Baxter
Been offered Abandon or Surrender? Chris. What do you reckon?

http://www.facebook.com/groups/157750540945214/?notif_t=group_activity

As ever with a pubco, it's a case of 'All or Everything': 'What's Ours is Ours; What's Yours is ... Ours'; 'You Pay, We Prosper'.

Enterprise defends tenants’ treatment

http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/General-News/Enterprise-defends-tenants-treatment

What a FARCE. Wake up you dozy gits! This industry is a farcical anachronistic backwater of poor business practice and dodgy dealing, at every level. It has infected every last nook and cranny of the United Kingdom.

Enterprise CANNOT defend the indefensible. Ted Tuppen and Simon Townsend are at the top of this behaviour and there is no way on earth they don't know about it happening - right under their feet at every level of operation. It is the same at S&NPC and the the other pubcos who cynically abuse the tie as a matter of rote...

Quite simply there is systemic abuse woven into the fabric of the actions of pubcos and Enterprise just sit at the top of the pile of bad behaviour. It's a fundamental part of the modus operandi and is taught at BDM finishing school that started at Grand Met in the 1970's and 1980's. It's common knowledge and is not discussed because it's just too shocking to admit as acceptable practice in contemporary business. It's like the institutional racism recorded in the police service but no onw has ever funded research into the subject here because, as the OFT says, it's a matter of contract between private individuals. After that it's quashed right from the top because rigorous external investigation of this joke of an industry would undoubtedly result in prosecutions of Directors and Jail sentences.

Besides tenants are bullied into keeping schtum. Their lives are on the line. It's endemic in the tied pub industry - everyone knows it - and everyone is too scared to look it in the face because one way or another everyone who's a part of it is ashamed of it and most are involved in some form of direct ILLEGAL activity because it's the only way you can survive in a tied pub.

Enterprise defends tenants’ treatment

http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Forums/News-Article-Comments/Enterprise-defends-tenants-treatment

IO thanks for enlightening me and apologies if I've completely forgotten that you've stated you are a retired BDM.

What I take issue with is your apparently rational suggestion that apparently rational things take place in the relationship between a pubco and their tenants.

This bears no relation to the reality which is that pubco employees connive, cheat, lie, misrepresent their business at all times, with a smile on their face and a learned, enthusiastic, supportive and enquiring timbre in their voice... with oblique and inapplicable suggestions for operational tweaks chucked in for good measure. That's during the good times (the time, between two to eighteen months after taking on a lease, before the tenant susses that they are on a slippery slope with financial ruin at the bottom). When there is a sniff that a tenant is in financial hardship this insincere stance gives over to obfuscation, threatening and bullying behaviour as a matter of course. 'To protect the Company's assets'.

Perhaps this was not the case in your day. I can't imagine when your day was though. It must have been a LONG time ago; My day in this archaic joke of an industry began in 1995 and signs of the above were evident from the start and began in earnest within three months of my taking on a new lease on a dead pub and turning it into a bustling, busy contemporary bar. It's not my imagination IO, I've been networking with tied lessees whose experience is the same for well over a decade and I have heard ex BDM's describe this culture, saying it made them have insomnia and turned their stomach so much they got out as soon as they could.

There.

J Mark Dodds Mind you back in 2008 after the government published estimates of the size of the Black Economy I pointed out that the REAL black economy - if they took account of what happens in the tied pub sector alone - is at least, conservatively, three times bigger than the official worst guesses. It may sound like I'm blowing my own trumpet but in the 2008 Select Committee hearings Ted Tuppen, completely out of the blue, picked up on the thrust of what I'd posted around the internet and on MA and the Publican forums and without prompting from anyone on the Committee or by any remotely related questioning, began telling the committee he had evidence that Lessees were underdeclaring income by hiding out of tie beer transactions and purchases they should be putting through Enterprises books - he was justifying the use of Brulines equipment. This surprising procedural interjection went down like a lead balloon with the MPs. A shiver of joy coursed through me as I guessed he'd read one of my rants about Enterprise making publicans into criminals!
2 seconds ago · Like

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Railway Hotel offered for sale

'My' pub for sixteen years - the pub they said to me a thousand times 'we believe £65K rent is sustainable - and this has been found to be the case at arbitration and High Court so we are comfortable with that' - (they forget to mention they thought £96K was 'easily sustainable' (as pontificated by David 'comprehensive schoolboy' Gooderham of AGG) at the beginning of arbitration) they are now touting around other tied lessees in south east London at £48K fully tied. No one will take it on.

LIBERAL DEMOCRAT VOICE

Article by Gareth Epps. 25.01.2012

Opinion: We need to tackle ‘crony capitalism’ on our watch

http://www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-we-need-to-tackle-crony-capitalism-on-our-watch-26755.html

Excellent, well informed piece.

Greg Mulholland is right on the nail on what's happening to pubs at the hands of Rackmanesque landlords. And the evidence he's right is all over the British town and landscape; closed, boarded up, failing dilapidated pubs. The main reason the pub industry is in such terrible decline is that it has been in the vice like grip of asset stripping private equity liars and cheats - the tied beer pubcos - who have abused their positions of responsibility by taking all profit from as many pubs as possible and syphoning it into debt repayments, bond and shareholder payments and morally and fiscally unsupportable pay packages for Directors, leaving no trading surplus for pub lessees to reinvest in their businesses. The legacy of these practices is decades of chronic underinvestment in the tied pub sector - by far the majority of pubs - leaving the fabric of the pub sector, its bricks and mortar, woefully run down, serving over priced beer due to the cartel set wholesale supply prices of the tied pubcos which have forced its customer base to shop elsewhere - where they can get better value and amenity - in places from Starbucks to the managed pub chains, in many cases owned by the very same pubcos who use their tied estates as a cash cow feifdom.

BIS simply chose to let thousands of publicans go down the Swanee and cut a bit more slack for the pubcos who are the ones who deserve to go to the wall simply for wilfully killing their own geese.

The tie is abused, outmoded, anachronistic and plain unfit for purpose. It MUST go.

ON FT.com

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This is only the tip of the iceberg. Pub closures are going to be going UP. The massive tied pub estates - mentioned above - are in disarray, operated by thousands of tenants whose profit margins have been systematically eroded by greedy landlords whose servicing of their irresponsibly acquired debt mountains depend on sapping every last drop of cash out of the cash cows of their leased estates where the tie allows them to be Rackmanesque in their own back yard with impunity.

The saying 'never doodoo on your own doorstep' has no meaning in the tied pub sector, that is how pubcos have been making their profits for the last twenty years and more.

To any lay person with an interest in the subject: You can tell a Tied Pub just by looking at it. By and large they are run down, dilapidated and look like you want to go to Starbucks. The reason is that the pubcos have over rented their estates - charged over market rent (they have been able to do this because they dominate the pub sector in such numbers that the market IS the tied pub rental market and all comparisons of 'Fair Rent' are made against other pubs whose rent has already been set too high) and pubcos have increased the wholesale price of beer, cartel fashion, to the whole of the tied estate well in excess of rpi and inflation and now beer to a tied pub costs DOUBLE what it does to a free of tie pub.

By and large Free of Tie Pubs are well looked after and attractive. They are either owned by the pubcos and managed by them i.e. they pay the staff and do not suck the business dry because it is their business not a lessee's...

The recent announcement by Ed Davey that 'self regulation is the way ahead' for pubcos is a travesty, a national disgrace that he, and his entire department' ought to be ashamed of. They have stubbornly laid out the financial funeral pyre for thousands more tied publicans and their families while sanctioning the boards of director fat cats ludicrous self serving pay packages as their businesses sink, inevitably into insolvency strangled by their own greed.

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We live in a class driven society where the rights of the wealthy, as defined by property ownership, and those who own the property are laid down in law and defended above all else. This is because when the foundations of the legal establishment were laid down the wealthy owned the land and the wealthy of course also happened to be the body of the judiciary who were writing the law - and the people in government, below the royal family, were their cronies, relatives, friends, business associates and school mates. Even if they were competitors at some level, when it came to their own security they all stood together. Together they removed the rights of poor people to own land and invented the lease. And rent. eBay the tithe. And the tie.

Not much has changed.

Corporations and their descendants have to some extent replaced many of the property owning families but really just sit alongside them protecting their inalienable, god given right to do very little labour to justify retaining and increasing their wealth.

It's this sticking together of landed families and property owning corporations that headed off a revolution in the British Isles when much the rest of the world was shaking off some of the burden of class based inequity. Violently. And why we're still a cap doffing curtsying proletariat and make up 99% against the 1% who own everything.

Legally corporations are as individuals. They have the rights of the landowner, the property holder, with the possible difference that the corporate brain may behave less responsibly than the individual because the executives look to their own security and wealth development in their own lifetime and possibly that of shareholders' rather than to the long term which, arguably, a family interest in property ownership may stimulate and sustain for the long term.

If you see the eviction notice on the Manor Arms in Clapham you'll see that Enterprise Inns is cited as the 'person' with rights over the property. It may seem like a small detail but it's at the bottom of everything that's wrong with our society and the root cause of the illness in the pub sector: http://bit.ly/xIUJWW

Whatever. We've got a long way to go. Unfortunately.

I like that eBay the Tithe above. That's the iPhone for you: always putting words in your posts.
15 minutes ago · Like · 1
J Mark Dodds Yes. I went onto eBay and bought The Tithe. I now have rights, although still a bankrupt former proletarian publican, to levy a ten percent charge on all transactions on eBay and on every financial exchange made throughout and in and out of the UK.
3 minutes ago · Like
J Mark Dodds I'm just going to sit back and watch my fortune grow, for generations, on my arse, and my children's children's arses, doing nothing - we'll pay stupid twats to run the Tithe for us, make them feel like they're important, and we'll get on with things like shooting, hunting and fishing and buying more property with the money coming in from the Tithe. Then we'll have lots of yachts and open topped sports cars. It will be spiffing. Really looking forward to it.

Marston's appoints new non-exec

http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/City-News/Marston-s-appoints-new-non-exec

One has to struggle to imagine what kind of 'valuable contribution, someone with a CV like that, *whatever happened to Laurel Pub Company?* can bring to Marston's but then when one pauses for a moment and consider what a lame duck Marston's makes out of half its business perhaps the true synergy of this new relationship starts to emerge.

*Trebles All Round*

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J Mark Dodds Two fully priced refurb schemes with S&NPC that ultimately I refused to go along with. I was the client except they were incapable of listening at all. Each caused me huge distraction from day to day business and in both cases held up refurbishment that was needed fairly urgently, that I ended up doing on my own without them, by at least a year, during which time business declined. These two refurbishment schemes were years apart. I refused to sign the deal on the first one which would have taken my rent from £32K to £65K because the 'BDM' point blank refused to show me their calculations or tell me how they arrived at their rentalisation figure of double what I was already paying. I asked him to read something from the works schedule and he obliged by saying: 'forecourt: lift existing paving, level, relay and make good. Part sum £16,000.' when I pointed out that the forecourt was tarmac he was totally unphased and said he'd chosen that at random and the project team are really good and know what they are doing. I refused to sign and he told me: "you are making a big mistake, you're going to regret this bad decision".

The second time was years, and three BDMs later. That one was going to put the rent up to £109K from 54K and leave me without the roof terrace that was central to the success of the project 'because when I number crunched the costs it got to £450K before I even got to the roof and I knew that would blow the budget. What I was left with is £109K but I've included the structural spec for the roof terrace which you can fund out of casha flow next season. I told him 'without the roof terrace there won't BE a next season, The business will go down the pan - you've just eradicated the garden with an extension and the roof terrace was to add in an extra USP to substitute for lost outdoor space on the ground.

I was told 'you can't back out of this now we've spent thousands preparing this scheme you're welching out on. You'll have to pay.

As a compromise on the second scheme I proposed an alternative refurb which would radically slash costs - and rent. This suggestion has to be signed off by the regional director who is a short ignorant bully with glasses. You know who you are you twat. The build cost for this one was £147K and the rent £80K with a six to eight week closure period. I ended up doing pretty much the same job myself, except with a stainless steel bespoke bar that I designed myself to much higher spec than Scotco's. I turned it round in six days and it cost £85K. Even then I had to organise all the cellar services myself because my 'BDM' had an oversight before going on holiday and forgot to tell the tech team to do a survey. When the dozy prick came back from hold with his tan (it was November) he walked in the pub, his jaw dropped and he said: "my god you must have spent at least £250K here; this is fantastic".

They are all total fuckwits and don't know the first thing about anything.

Tim Martin knows that our Old Etonians really are rotten old onions:

but unfortunately some of his pubs leave a lot to be desired...
20 hours ago - Dawn Hopkins

The pub market is dominated on the one hand by tied pubs suffering from chronic underinvestment and the other by anodyne branded pile it high flog it cheap chain operations, mid range branded chain operations and top end chain operations desperately trying to look bespoke and individual, serving food off menus which, on the face of it, look like they are lovingly assembled with care, drawing from seasonal local produce and cooked to order by caring chefs who are passionate about food which in fact are identical to all the menus in the group, centrally produced and distributed to be assembled soullessly by deskilled food production operatives. Mitchells and Butlers are the masters of these formula pits that generate huge revenues ... pubs that are truly individual in all ways are getting thinner on the ground all the time. - J Mark Dodds

S&NPC package empowers lessees

http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Forums/News-Article-Comments/S-NPC-package-empowers-lessees/%28offset%29/10#604663

'Interested Observer': The voice of reason as ever. Your posting all that 'objective' stuff shows you've learned nothing about pubcos and the pub sector from your time on this forum. An objective step aside. considering your posting history, makes your appearance seem transparently clear that you're some high up pubco employee bent on justifying the indefensible. From your long history of sitting on the even handed fence I'd say you probably work for Marston's.

Whatever. The point is, IO, that pubcos should all be damned, as a matter of course, as totally unfit for purpose and be thrown in the waste bin of history for asset stripping the nation of its heritage.

The pub industry is 50 years behind where it should be and within that S&NPC leads the pack in its utter incomprehension of what pubs are about. Their only interaction with publicans / lessees is to cross T's and dot I's to make sure pubco will never under any circumstance be exposed to any form of risk, or get egg on its face when their lessees fail to comply with some aspect of legislation that the freeholder should have sorted before letting out their crumbling bricks and mortar to real people via bloated over priced FRI leases.

There is no transparency whatsoever on the freeholder's side of the pub sector. They're in it for the money and stop at nothing to get every last penny out as cast as they can.

IPC press statement 17.01.12

INDEPENDENT PUB CONFEDERATION

IPC PRESS STATEMENT – 17TH JANUARY 2012

The Independent Pub Confederation (IPC) – an important umbrella organisation for publicans, consumers and small brewers – today warned Ministers not to deviate from the action plan laid out by MPs in a debate on pub companies in the House of Commons last week, if they wanted to secure the future of thousands of individual small businesses.

After 7 years and 4 Inquiries into the imbalance of power between pub companies and their lessees, the Select Committee rightly recommended that the Government fulfil its promise to consult on the content and legal status of a Code of Practice, and recommended this include anoption for tenants to be freed from the beer tie and introduce an independent adjudicator.

This was rejected by the Government, which instead accepted alternative proposals for self-regulation presented by the pub companies. These proposals were not endorsed by any member of the IPC and had not been shared in full with key stakeholders responsible for delivering them. A Freedom of Information Act request by LibDem MP and Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Save the Pub Group, Greg Mulholland revealed that the Government’s response to the Select Committee’s recommendations had been to cut and paste – including typographical errors – from a report by the BBPA.

This dismissal out of hand of the authoritative, exhaustive and well thought through report by the Select Committee was roundly condemned by MPs from all sides in last week’s debate. MPs unanimously agreed a motion calling on the Government to continue to monitor the behaviour of pub companies and to review progress to deliver a robust self regulatory framework by autumn 2012.

In a separate letter to all stakeholders, Ed Davey MP, Minister for Employment Relations, Consumer and Postal Affairs, makes clear that he expects the BBPA to enter into meaningful dialogue to address the issues of concern to lessees, including rent setting, AWP machines and exclusive purchase agreements. The IPC wrote to the BBPA offering to meet to discuss its agenda for reform in September 2011 – a reply has yet to be received.

Bill Sharp, Chairman of the IPC, said:

“All of our members – and the public at large – have a right to be very angry at the approach taken by Mr Davey. The Select Committee’s recommendations were not taken lightly and were the result of a very thorough investigation. They would – if adopted – lead the way to much needed change in pub sector and to the survival of many more of our local pubs.

“The IPC has always said it stands ready to engage constructively with all parties to deliver a final, lasting solution to the problems which have bedevilled our sector for so long. Unfortunately, our experience is that nothing will happen unless there is political pressure to deliver it and that is why the Parliament-backed review in Autumn 2012 is so vital. What we need now is a clear statement from the Minister setting out how he intends to work with the Select Committee to commission that review, its remit and timetable for action. Only then will individual lessees know that Ed Davey MP is concerned about their position too.”

BISC: 'Government response is BBPA’s own report'

http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Forums/News-Article-Comments/BISC-Government-response-is-BBPA-s-own-report#603396

What's all the fuss about?

This IS NOT CRONY CAPITALISM and it is OUTRAGEOUS to suggest, in any way, that the government colluded with the BBPA.

THERE WAS NO COLLUSION.

Ed Davey's department simply asked BBPA to ask Simon Townsend to write the government's response.

That is not collusion. It's DELEGATION.

Given the imperative to be financially astute and to make savings at every level of government, this was simply an innovative, highly efficient and creative use of available resources.

Give Ed Davey a silver star and send him to the headmaster for a commendation on inclusivity.

Judging by recent reports on the pub industry in the Broadsheets it looks like the BBPA, the font of all reliable information about the pub sector, has been saying that current pub closures are down to '20 a month' - or under 5 a week. Perhaps they got this wrong, maybe the BBPA told them it's 20 a week but whatever the figure:

That's down from the BBPA's own figures of:
52 a week in the first half of 2009
39 a week in early 2010
25 a week in early 2011

SO the rate of pub closures has stemmed to much less than half that of three years ago.

Rubbish.

A Christmas Wish: Camberwell Online

http://www.camberwellonline.co.uk/2011/12/a-christmas-wish/#comment-447285

Yes. Happy New Year Gabe.

Have to say: Ire is not far away for me …

Southwark has sold out Camberwell YET AGAIN. More behind closed doors plans plots passing of property around WITHOUT CONSULTATION, no doubt our leaders will say “people in Camberwell say they have been consulted to death, what they want is action” … WELL, we’re giving them some action now and there’s no need to consult now BECAUSE WE KNOW WHAT THEY WANT”

What’s happening to the Town Hall?

What’s happening to ALL THE SECTION 106 money that’s coming in to Southwark in the back of all the developments happening in Camberwell / SE5. What happened to the COMMUNITY USE in the planning brief for the building on the site of Age Concern on Coldharbour Lane?

When are Trading Standards going to get on the case with the Redeemed Christian Church of God who are advertising: “A CHURCH WHERE DIVINE INTERVENTION IS A COMMON OCCURRENCE” right here in sleepy old SE5.

Converting Pubs' Upstairs

http://www.facebook.com/groups/142674799109124/doc/299837883392814/

The accommodation above pubs should always be kept with the business - for the reasons stated by Ian Loe. But pubs have to be run as stand alone businesses with the accommodation being one element of that business rather than as an added on discount to activities downstairs. It is hard for pubs to operate financially successfully as stand alone businesses now - there are many influences of the pub market that make it so - and without the economies of scale that larger, group businesses can apply it is difficult for individuals running single outlets to compete against the wider marketplace. However this does not mean that a group operation must be run as a monolothic, homogenised series of bland carbon copy roll outs of one pub repeated - with the same drink and food menus all over the country - which is the model that has overtaken the pub sector in the last forty years. NO; bland and boring and big is not an absolute requirement but a diversion from where pubs should have been going if the national pub estate had been well managed in recent decades which it manifestly has not. Economies of scale do need to be applied to pubs - in business terms as collections of 'units' - but this should be done with regard to the needs of the whole while understanding the needs of the individual and operating the estate with a mind to that - every single pub in a managed estate of many pubs needs the direct support, back office functions, buying power and administrative strength that only a highly experienced head office administration can bring to an operation but to be truly sustainable businesses each pub must be run as individual, locally relevant autonomous businesses that respond to their immediate market conditions, their customers and local economy - and this has to be done under the auspices of management who know their premises, their customers and local conditions; within the whole.

Crocker's Folly

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jjwillow/3820004421/

Crocker's Folly

Poor old Crocker's Folly. This once grand old pub is now boarded up. One hopes not for too much longer as it is already showing signs of decay, with windows broken and weeds growing out of the plasterwork.

There are adverts proclaiming the opening of a new branch of the Maroush Lebanese restaurant chain, but I have a feeling it has been 'coming soon' for a while now. I notice it is listed for sale at £4.25 million, and ominously, the blurb says 'Can Produce 20 S/C Studio Flats'. www.the-estate-office.co.uk/featured/property.php?id=46&a...

It would be a shame to lose such an historic pub. It has a wonderful story behind it, as best described in Ted Bruning's exellent book, Historic Pubs of London...

"...Here is true folly: folly preserved forever in mahogany and marble, folly on a princely scale, folly so tragic that London has been laughing about it for over a century. Originally The Crown Hotel, this grand pub was built in the 1890s in an unassuming Maida Vale side street by a Kilburn publican named Frank Crocker. And what a palace Frank built!

It had - still has - two bars: a public bar of no more than ordinary magnificence, and a grand saloon with marble bar-top and pilasters, marble stringing, marble archways, even a great marble fireplace; with a magnificent Jacobean-style coffered ceiling of the most intricate plasterwork; and acres of gleaming woodwork.

It is mad - the demented dream of an architect who has overdosed on a mixture of hallucinogens and mason's catalogues. The former billiard-room, now a carvery, is scarcely less ornate: but perhaps the bust of Caracalla is a sly demonstration that the pub's designers were quite conscious of the excess to which their client was pushing them: Caracalla was a Roman emperor known for his architectural excesses and his complete insanity.

The whole thing was the biggest gamble in the history of pubs: the railway was approaching from the north, heading straight as an arrow for Maida Vale. Surely, reasoned Crocker, it would stop right were he was building his palatial pub; and the Crown Hotel would become the Railway Hotel, and a goldmine.

Alas for Crocker! The line turned left a few degrees at St John's Wood, to terminate not at his doorway, but about a mile away, where Marylebone Station now stands. The Crown Hotel was a palace in the middle of nowhere; the grandest folie in London.

Crocker, naturally, went bust and then killed himself by jumping out of an upstairs window.

For years the pub mouldered on as an absurdly grand local; a photograph of 1967 shows it much as it was built, even down to a few surviving sticks of the original custom made furniture. Only the gas fittings had been changed, and the tawdry little lights with which they had been replaced speak volumes.

In 1983 the Crown was bought by north eastern brewer Vaux, which formally adopted its nickname and then sold it to Regent Inns, which now runs at a big, bustling profit. They say Crocker's ghost appears each evening at cashing up time, his dead eyes bulging with spectral envy."

MY OWN TAKE HERE:

IN the gamut of pub closures the length and breadth of the land this pub is slightly unusual but the fundamental problem with pubs that are finished like this; and there are many, many such cases, is NOT that there is no direct and immediate potential for these pubs to be welcoming, busy, vibrant, exciting catering businesses that are absolutely relevant to the demands, expectations and aspirations of contemporary customers; it's that the buildings have lacked sympathetic insightful investment under brewers and pub companies for the last forty years. This chronic underinvestment has left the national pub estate - what I consider to be OUR, the public's, very own bricks and mortar - in a perilously weak state from which in most instances there is no return.

If the right kind of capital were available to buy these freeholds and then develop them sensitively to match the needs of the contemporary audience they would not be suffering threat at all; instead these pubs would be acting as they always could; had they been managed for the right reasons instead of for the short term gain of the interests of private equity investors; they would still be important focuses of community activity, places of congregation, of human sustenance and of conversation by turns intellectual insightful and scurrilous conversation AND they would be generating healthy financial surpluses that could be ploughed back into the communities and the wider economy.

www.peoplespubpartnership.org

Wenlock Saved by Michael Clarke:

http://www.macnovel.org.uk/?p=1236

Excellent piece.

There remains need for caution beyond the issue of what happens to the pub regarding future tenure

I’m a publican and one of the founders of the Fair Pint Campaign and very familiar with these issues and how they’ve impacted on pubs and communities all over the uk and how they continue to threaten many thousands more pubs, particularly those, as you mention, that are not so busy and lack the support of a staunch band of regular or loyal informed and interested customers as does the Wenlock.

It’s a very British malaise that is dynamically affecting communities everywhere and, one way or another in the vast majority of instances is driven by insatiable Private Equity financial greed; individual and corporate.

A note of caution: In spite of immediate reprieve from demolition due to extension of the conservation, as the pub is a stand alone freehold without physical connection to any other building, I believe there’s still the possibility that The Wenlock could be converted into a grocery store / supermarket without any need for a planning application.