The 2 Types of ‘Alert’ from “Community Alert on Pubs”

1. The National and Local Decline in Numbers

• Pubs are currently going through a crisis which is deepening daily. The Credit Crunch is the strongest challenge it currently faces, but this comes on top of continuing Excise Duty increases, the smoking ban, and loss-leader type marketing by supermarkets on beer, lager and other alcoholic drinks. Additionally it has to compete against its own customers’ ever-enhanced in-home entertainment facilities.
• According to the British Beer and Pub Association (the UK’s leading organization representing the brewing and pub sector and accounting for 98% of the beer sold in the UK and owning nearly two thirds of Britain’s 56,000 pubs,) 1,973 pubs shut in 2008, 40% higher than the 1,409 closures in 2007.
• The rate of closing is accelerating. A record of 39 pubs closing a week was recorded for the second half of 2008, compared with 36 a week for the first half of 2008. Britain’s pubs are now closing almost ten times faster than in 2006 (four a week) and nearly twenty times faster than in 2005 (two a week).
• The BPPA claims that 44,000 jobs have been lost across the sector in the last two years.
  
  
  

2. Owners shutting pubs with £ property gain and/or to become ‘eyesores’

West Dorset appears to have a particular problem in this respect and sometimes pubs have been shut for many years. Usually it will occur when a proprietor claims a pub is ‘unviable’, shuts the pub and it becomes ‘dead’. The decision can be fought by the community but if the community wins the legal argument it is no guarantee of a swift re-opening of the pub – the owner can currently apparently refuse to do anything.

At The Old Swan at Toller Porcorum, Dorset, the pub suddenly shut, and despite a Govt Inspector ruling that the pub was indeed viable the proprietor decided to leave it boarded up, dilapidating over the years in front of the community whose £ revenues had kept it going throughout the centuries - and with the community keenly arguing for a sale of it, or at the least the re-opening of it. This is a purely wasted closure – it appears the owner has preferred to allow it to be non-revenue-earning for over ten years and to let it dilapidate.

Other notable pubs - in fact hotels - to be shut while the owners consider options and apply for planning permission - or just consider options - are the historic Three Cups at Lyme Regis and the White Hart at Beaminster.

The Three Cups at Lyme Regis is a beautiful Georgian building. It is where JRR Tolkien conceived early material for works such as 'the Hobbit' and 'the Lord of the Rings' . Celebrated literary figures such as GK Chesterton visited there and it was the scene in 1981 of several film sequences of the iconic ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’. This building has been shut by the owners, and left empty, for a period of nearly twenty years. The building continues to dilapidate and has become an “eyesore”.

The White Hart at Beaminster occupies the area in the town where there was an old coaching house some 400 years ago. Today it has been shut for around five years while the owners seek particular planning permission. The historic ‘Hine Bar’ is sadly gone, and the hotel is empty, the signs are down and there is a danger of building dilapidation.