How to save a pub in practice
March 2022: How to save a pub in practice
Return to The Swan With Two Necks
Round-up of the past month
Return to The Swan With Two Necks
Back in 2019 we noticed that a run down pub on a back street just to the east of Bristol city centre had come under new management. Here's what we wrote at the time:
"When we visited the pub shortly after its reopening, it was clear that all was not quite well, thanks to an A-board on the pavement outside with a message that felt like a falsely cheerful defensive reply to criticism received. It began 'Hello lovely humans', listed the pub’s many great qualities, made a point about the price/quality/value, and concluded 'Why not pop in and see if this is true, or am I simply a…. windbag/filthy liar? You decide.'"
The new landlord, Jamie Ashley, had taken some steps that angered the regulars: no more cask Bass, no more Foster's lager, more craft beer. And an overall increase in the price of a pint.
We did our best to write about this honestly and fairly but it's clearly an emotional topic and we felt, frankly, a bit mean. After all, Jamie is a very nice bloke and, for the sake of the pub, we hoped this experiment would succeed.
As far as we could see, the alternative wouldn't be the pub reverting to its old ways but, rather, closing for good and probably becoming yet another block of flats.
We can't say we were hopeful, though. It was often quiet and sometimes closed when you'd expect it to be open.
Then along came COVID-19 with is rollercoaster of closures and complex restrictions. We assumed a pub that had never quite found its stride would be done for.
In January this, year, though, we made a return visit and were delighted to find that not only had the pub survived but seemed to have found something of a crowd.
An interesting crowd, at that, with older ale drinkers alongside beany-hatted artistic types alongside local lasses in their going-out dresses alongside lads on a crawl alongside... All sorts.
Pub blogger Martin Taylor visited recently and observed similar:
"I’ll forgive the lack of Bass, the Vibrant Forest Oat & Coffee Stout is superbly rich, an easy 3.5+. But it’s the mix of folk that makes this an instant new Brizzle favourite. Some interesting rockabilly (i.e. not Stray Cat Strut) was drowned out by blokes talking about 1972 Genesis albums. DON’T ask me which one; I’m not a Proggie."
This feels to us like a model for how these things can be done.
The makeover wasn't aggressive or total. The pub hardly looks any different to how it did in 2018 when Ray visited on his own – just tidier, cleaner and brighter.
Culturally, there are some important signals being sent, too: no food, no cocktail menu, and always an ale on offer at less than £4 a pint.
It's still clearly an old-fashioned pub, not a bar or 'concept'.
Watching Jamie at work, it was obvious he wanted to make people feel welcome. All it seems to take is a smile and some friendly chat at the bar, dished out with equal generosity to everyone.
You might say, oof, £3.90 a pint isn't cheap compared to a Wetherspoon pub but it's at the lower end of the going rate in Bristol these days.
And, let's face it, this is the economic reality: an ordinary pint in an ordinary pub increasingly feels like a luxury purchase.
At least at the Swan you can still get tiddly for less than £20.
Of course it's not ideal that anyone should feel priced out, especially in what remains a predominantly low-income neighbourhood – but the pub is still there, still trading, and busy with it.
This offers some hope to other endangered pubs such as The Rhubarb which we can very easily see undergoing the same kind of transformation in the right hands.
Of course there's a potential snag: Jamie Ashley has just left Bristol to go and live in New Zealand.
But the pub has been taken over by Elmer who also runs the nearby Elmer's Arms.
We hear his intention is to leave it much the same but we can already see a few tweaks -- presumably because Jamie took some of the bric-a-brac with him.
For example, the bright pink gnome behind the bar holding a sign saying NO CU*TS has gone. Perhaps, on balance, an improvement in terms of making the place feel welcoming.
Our writing from the past month
Over a pint or two we found ourselves asking when the idea of the pub crawl came into being. We couldn't quite answer that question – as a commenter observed, people have surely been staggering from boozer to boozer for centuries – but we did dig into the origins of the phrase.
We wrote a chunky post about The Chelsea Drugstore, a hip 'pub of the future' opened by Bass Charrington in London in 1968. It expands on the few words for which we had space in our book 20th Century Pub. (We've still got copies of that for sale if anyone wants one, by the way.)
Still thinking about the current enthusiasm for cask mild we reflected on trends and how beer styles can't make a triumphant comeback until they've really gone away.
Digging through our collection of in-house magazines from Trumans we found some interesting stuff on the maintenance and preparation of casks, including notes on the role of the professional 'cask smeller'.
We shared some snippets from V.S. Pritchett's 1962 book London Perceived about how London's pubs changed in his lifetime: "Many of the new ‘democratic’ pubs where the separate bars have been abolished are dolled up with arty iron and glass work, coloured glasses, artificial flowers, fake Toby jugs, plushy wall-papers, and chains of coloured lights..."
And on Sunday, Ray shared a piece inspired by his attendance at a talk of the Barton Hill History Group round the corner from our house: "The neighbourhoods of Barton Hill, Lawrence Hill and Redfield in East Bristol are something of a graveyard for pubs, it turns out. On Wednesday 16 March, I attended the wake..."
There were also our usual round-ups of other people's writing which you can find archived under 'News' and a few bits and pieces for Patreon subscribers, too, including notes on the best beers we had each weekend. (Bristol Beer Factory Lost in Munich is a beer of the year contender, by the way: a more sessionable take on Schneider Hopfenweisse.)
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Until next month, then, that's your lot.
Cheers!
Ray & Jess