Bendigedig

Nothing in this world, or indeed the Universe, is permanent: this much is known, indeed simple common sense, and even if one subscribes to the nature of permanence simply because one's family has a storied and written & illustrated history going back centuries and houses to match this mythology, it's all essentially an illusory, and in the scheme of things, highly short-term view. The landed gentry aside - and they really should be just that: aside, given their track record in society - we have similar, albeit smaller scale 'traditions' in the real world that are also pretty transitory in nature. I'm thinking of course about the humble public house and its rise and fall.

We like to think of the village pub as the ideal archetype; the hub of community life, and an essential and central part of an imagined, atomic community of locals. Which confected stability of course presupposes a constancy of both regular imbibers and landlords alike; which of course, on a moments sober reflection, is essentially unmaintainable, as both punters and gaffers alike come and go, their establishments changing as they both change. Generations come, generations go, and the local hostelry tunes itself to suit the times. These days, the only 'true' country pubs are themselves confections of a middle-class notion of what Ye Olde English [always 'English'] Pub should be; and cosy as some actually might be, they ain't in any way genuine.

Given the overbearing economic and social pressures that the pub industry is burdened by these days, with overheads, rates, taxation and reduced footfall due to changing social habits, it's a wonder that the business survives at all, and it is a very different environment in which both to trade and be a punter in, compared to even twenty-five or thirty years ago. Nevertheless, the history of the public house and its trade is beset with such negative pressures throughout its [modern] history, with successive cultural forces, usually from on high, seeking to control and corral the 'excesses' - of the working classes for the most part - in some patrician attempt at social engineering.

Pubs moved from alehouses - literally, people's houses open to all-comers to have a drink in warm and convivial surroundings - in the mid-Victorian era, to licensed premises that crowded the streets of large cities and small towns alike, selling cheap and plentiful ales and liquor to the masses, most of whom had only a few hours a week recreation time to themselves, to forget the hardships of their base survival at the hands of both their work bosses and unscrupulous landlords alike. Religion and the Temperance movement sought in the latter part of the 1800s to at least manage these perceived 'liberties' for the benefit of those [in their eyes] poor, wretched souls, who obviously couldn't know any better. The licensing laws were tightened and the market was trammelled in such a way as to reduce the number of establishments and place their profit centre in the control of those that obviously 'knew better'.

Then came The Great War, and despite evidence to the contrary, the authorities decided - again, that patrician attitude - that unless the licensing laws tightened the screws on pubs and drinking, the great unwashed would simply piss their lives away and not engage with the war effort at all. Opening hours were highly restricted - a situation unrelieved until the late twentieth century - and the strength of beers and ales was reduced by statute. These strictures were relaxed somewhat after the Armistice, but regulation remained extremely tight. During the 1920s and '30s, there was a further move to push drinking away from the working people of the inner cities out into green belt countryside, with beneficial planning incentives to build large 'roadhouses' outside of the city, and more restricting regulation of inner city houses. Usually, these places were themed and aimed at the burgeoning middle class, who could afford the kind of motor transport unavailable to the working man. The green belt gradually became absorbed within the larger confines of major cities and these places became the de facto pubs of the post-second-world-war era, reaching their heyday in the 1960s and '70s.

Fast forward to now, and we have a very mixed bag of survivors in the pub trade, a very few genuine hangovers to a bucolic past lasted into the early 2000s, but I doubt there are any 'real' ones left. Even the ones we know around here with a genuine, documented history - such as The Bull in Beaumaris, dating back five or six hundred years - are no longer comfortably within the tradition of the local, owned as they are by a corporate. We count ourselves fortunate however, here in God's own country - that little slice of North Wales that is my home - to have one survivor out of the twelve or so High Street pubs we used to have in Bethesda, to have The Bull Inn [Tafarn Y Tarw], where time moves slow enough that we regulars are not upended by too much 'progress'. It's by no means perfect, but then, no real pub truly is...