British pubs are recovering from years of closing time

Cycling home from work this week, I passed The Artillery Arms public house next to Bunhill Fields, the graveyard where the writers John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and William Blake are buried. It was a sunny evening near the City of London and customers were standing by the railings, drinking pints of beer.

It was a characteristic British scene, as evocative in its way as the words of Blake’s poem “Jerusalem”, turned into a patriotic hymn by William Parry in 1916. Any vision of “England’s green and pleasant land” must include the taverns and alehouses that formed the heart of towns and villages, with a long history reaching back to Roman and Anglo-Saxon times.

Many have ended up in the financial graveyard over recent years. There were more pubs in the early 18th century than now, serving less than a tenth of the population. Pandemic lockdowns, followed by severe inflation in drink, food and energy costs, have killed others: more than 500 shut last year after financial support expired.

So it was a pleasant surprise to hear this week that some are taking their lead from “Jerusalem” and fighting back. Heineken, the brewer that owns 2,400 pubs in the UK through its Star Pubs & Bars arm, is reopening 62 that closed in recent years and investing £40mn on this and other refurbishments, such as improving gardens and expanding kitchens.

JD Wetherspoon, the chain founded by Sir Tim Martin, said that sales were in “steady recovery”. The “chattering classes” were drinking more wine and free coffee refills were “thought to be responsible for spontaneous exhibitions of breakdancing among retired customers”, Martin said. He was joking, but the mood has improved.

One would need to be intoxicated to believe that a cyclical recovery, accelerated by warmer weather and the prospect of drinkers crowding into pubs to watch the Euro 2024 football tournament starting in June, amounts to a reversal of history. After what Richard Bradley, director of the consultancy Frontier Economics, calls “some shocking years”, the main feeling is of relief.

But it reinforces something proved over the centuries: pubs are adaptable. The mythical Moon Under Water Victorian pub eulogised by George Orwell, in which “the barmaids know most of their customers by name” was different from medieval taverns and a Wetherspoons is something else again. Pubs are familiar, but not immutable.

Given that they predate the Industrial Revolution that alarmed Blake and were around before cathedrals, they have needed to be. Pubs are flexible by nature: the name just denotes a place to drink beer in company. They have been through many hard times but have evolved with society.

The Artillery Arms illustrates this. Once called the Blue Anchor Tavern, it was run by a Victorian landlord who organised rat-killing tournaments for dogs. These days, it caters to gentler tastes, and is taking bookings for the Euros. It has a good location: the City enjoys the highest concentration of pubs per resident in the UK, thanks to its daily influx of office workers.

Pubs have been redistributed in recent decades in a way that does not fit the legend. Many have closed in rural areas, outer suburbs and towns but there are more of them in Hackney than 20 years ago. These include four within a five-minute walk of my home, which are packed with young people respecting tradition. Urban gentrification is a friend to the local pub.

Heineken’s initiative is a modest revision to recent trends. It is reopening pubs such as the Ship Inn in Worsbrough, near Barnsley in South Yorkshire and investing in suburban locals that have gained from people working from home rather than commuting to cities. It plans to smarten them up and introduce “zones” for people to watch sports or eat together.

This feels alien to a traditional “wet-led” pub in which drinking is the main point (although the divide between the “public bar” and the posher “saloon bar” in Victorian pubs was a form of zoning). But it reflects the evolution of pubs into combinations of bars, entertainment hubs and cafés: nearly 40 per cent of Wetherspoon’s sales now come from serving food.

“It is hard to make money just from pulling pints behind a bar, the way we used to back in the day,” David McDowall, chief executive of the UK’s largest pub group Stonegate, told me this week. Stonegate has financial challenges — it must refinance £2.2bn of debt that comes due next year — but he is “cautiously optimistic” about trade.

Even before this week, the flow of pub failures did not tell the whole story. Behind it lies another one, of smaller pubs being closed and business consolidating to large hospitality outlets. Wetherspoon has 137 fewer pubs than in 2015, but the sales at each one are far higher. Pubs have grown more profitable as they have changed.

“When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England,” the Franco-British writer Hilaire Belloc once warned. That danger has receded.

john.gapper@ft.com

Letter in response to this column:

Diminishing transparency in pubs is not small beer / From Jonathan Fletcher, Helston, Cornwall, UK