Excellent article. Good to see the real story of the Great British Pubco Scam getting into the mainstream... Hopefully not too late to halt the carnage in UK's pubs and preserve and improve what's left.
What the pubco's have done to the pub sector is nothing less than a massive cultural crime that's quietly been nibbling away at the heart of British society for 25 years. The symptoms are visible all around us like the signs of an undiagnosed creeping endemic disease caused by a deadly virus whose long term prognosis is only just being fully assessed late into the onset of plague.
Terrible problem now is we ain't seen nothing yet. There's so much disease in the system, so many thousand pubs have been mortally weakened through chronic underinvestment while they've been asset stripped by their pubco freeholders churning tenants (surely no one reading this can be unaware of the classic symptoms of publican after publican passing through the doors of a pub local to them as the building slides slowly into disrepair and custom falls away) at last the cause of the deadly disease is being identified and the diagnosis is getting out there for all to understand.
What's desperately needed now is a cure, a programme of recovery and recuperation on a massive scale, and currently there's nothing in sight that can begin to address the scale if damage that's been wrought on the British pub sector, and this society's very own sense of place, by a bunch of pubco short term private equity bandits deliberately plundering our cultural heritage. Heads should roll and punitive jail sentences be handed out but instead, as with the banks, it'll be a load of equity cash ins and golden goodbyes handed out as the indebted pubco's that infected the nation wind down, their job done.
What's desperately needed now is a cure, a programme of recovery and recuperation on a massive scale, and currently there's nothing in sight that can begin to address the scale if damage that's been wrought on the British pub sector, and this society's very own sense of place, by a bunch of pubco short term private equity bandits deliberately plundering our cultural heritage. Heads should roll and punitive jail sentences be handed out but instead, as with the banks, it'll be a load of equity cash ins and golden goodbyes handed out as the indebted pubco's that infected the nation wind down, their job done.
I wonder whether you know that head office of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, is in St Albans?
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| The Athenaeum Camberwell. SE5. Once a beautiful high profile public house Reference an article by Roger Protz |
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