The Core

This is good.  I was having panic attacks every time I read an article about pubs disappearing in the U.K.

Why are they declining?

Why are they declining?

Most pubs used to be owned by the major breweries as a means to distribute their brand of beer.  Thatcher changed that in a reform, and each brewery was allowed to own X number of pubs. The rest sold or closed.  Later consolidation occurred in the British brewing industry which further hit the corner pubs.  Anyway, that's what I read started it.

Plus what Rupert said.

Why are they declining?

The French cafe is disappearing too. There are so many reasons and I suspect that many apply to pubs

1. Central heat in the home. This was a real killer. Working people went to the cafes because they were heated
2. Televisions
3. Refrigerators. People underestimate how much damage the refrigerator did to social relations. Read Lawrence Wylie, Village in Vaucluse - amazing book (get the edition with all the updates). He cites it as one of the main reasons for the decline in social life in French villages in the 1970s (people forget just how late rural France was electrified).

PS... unrelated, but people also don't typically realize how much the invention of cheap matches destroyed the social connections of women in rural France in the 19th century. It was common for women to "accidentally" let the fire go out so they had an excuse to go out into the village and beg coals off a neighbor. The problem is that in carrying the coals back home, it was not that uncommon to catch the village on fire. So there was a big push to make matches available, which meant that a lot of women then ended up stuck in the home.

With the high value of real estate in the UK, breweries/pub owners are often selling the property to developers or supermarket chains. Sad to say but the money to be made in running a traditional pub can often be ridiculously low, hence many taking the route to sell the pub (which is often a large building) to the highest bidder.

I know that they changed the SMOKING laws in Dublin.

What about the rest of the UK?

If I, as a younger MF, could not smoke in a Pub I just might not visit a Pub...

Plus increased commute times by car and increased use of cars rather than walking everywhere.

I was going to mention that as a major factor in France as well. There are all sorts of follow-on effects. You now don't work in the village, but in the city. So you buy your groceries and such on the way home. The you go for a drink with the mates before going home (but just one drink, because now you have to drive). So in rural France, not only does that put pressure on cafes, it also made it possible for a priest to serve multiple parishes. So the village Lawrence Wylie studied ended up with a "commuter" priest who would do the 8am mass in one village, the 10am mass in another, and then go back to his home in the city.

>>smoking laws

I wonder about this. In the 1980s, I remember telling people that I would not go to the cafes in Madison, Wisconsin, because they were all so smokey. I said they could get a lot of business by banning smoking. Everyone told me I was stupid. People want a coffee and a smoke. I moved to Switzerland and then came back to find every single downtown cafe had banned smoking.

What happened? The owner remodelled Sunprint cafe. When she did, she was shocked to see the years of accumulated smoke on the ceiling and that the art on the walls had actually been ruined. So she banned smoking. Suddenly, all the non-smoking coffee drinkers abandoned Steep and Brew and the other cafes. It was impossible to get a spot at Sunprint. Within six months, all the other cafes had gone non-smoking because their business had collapsed. And personally, I started going to cafes again.