Some of you may have heard Ann Wroe, obituaries editor for The Economist, interviewed on the CBC about her eloquent "elegy for the English pub." The old fashioned English pubs, icons of Englishness itself, are shutting their doors at an alarming rate of 50 a day, or 6000 in the last 5 years!
Some friends had dropped off a copy of the magazine a while back, and I'd meant to post something on it, but had forgotten until I heard her on the radio last night. When a pub dies, Wroe writes, much more dies with it. Here are a few excerpts that get at how a good pub serves its community, and a link to the full article at the bottom.
The church can go, long since the preserve of a flower-arranging few; the local shop can go, since the distant hypermarket’s cheapness is worth the petrol; but the vanishing of a pub means, by common consent, the loss of the beating heart of a community, in town or countryside. A pub can become a sort of encapsulation of place, containing some small turning’s grainy photographs, its dog-eared posters for last year’s fete, its snoozing cats, its prettiest girls behind the bar and its strangest characters in front of it. The Square & Compass at Worth Matravers in Dorset, on the Jurassic Coast, has accumulated so many fossils brought in by punters that it has its own little museum. Most longstanding pubs have a fossil equivalent, and not merely on the human side: cases of moths, dusty farm implements or, at the Widow’s Son in Bromley-by-Bow, a hanging bundle of blackened hot-cross buns to which, every Good Friday for 150 years, another has been added.
