Building

community

spirit

During his travels as the Daily Telegraph's pub correspondent, Adam Edwards has found that Britain's local pubs provide their regulars with far more than just a place to have a quiet drink

Fourteen months ago Boscastle flooded. A massive wave of water swept down the narrow main street of the Cornish resort and shipped the pay & display car park and Harbour Lights gift shop into the Atlantic Ocean. The emergency services scrambled, the media was alerted, royalty arrived and the tiny former fishing village took pride of place on News at Ten.

Its close neighbour Crackington Haven also flooded. But there was no oxygen of publicity for it. It was ignored as the flotsam and jetsam swirled beneath the feet of the locals who hurried as a man to the safety of the first-floor bar of the Coombe Barton Inn. The pub was the only dry spot in the seaside hamlet. It was there that the locals licked their wounds, rang friends and relatives, ate handsomely, drank Doom Bar bitter and grudgingly watched the rescue services mopping up neighbouring Boscastle on TV.

The pub had become Crackington Haven's only emergency service. It performed the function of lifeboat man, helicopter pilot, policeman, doctor, nurse and, of course, priest with the offer of spiritual help from the optics. The Coombe Barton Inn was no longer just at the heart of a community, it was its lifeblood.

Those who don't patronise the pub, in my opinion the greatest of all British communal institutions, believe that it is no more than a bolt-hole from the wife where customers are watered with pints of wallop and fed with cheesy pies and pasties. The rest of us know better.

The pub is the corner store selling Rizlas and Rolos and the occasional alcoholic take away. It is a phone booth, cigarette machine and local information service. It is a sometime snack bar, post office, library, picture gallery, hotel, car park, snooker hall, bowling alley, quiz show, cricket club, meeting room and debating chamber. And most of all it is a community centre.

In the last five years I have travelled the length and breadth of Britain seeking out worthwhile licensed premises. Some have been grim, most have been glorious, but whether they have served cheap beer and scratchings or fine wine and foie gras, almost all support and are supported by a singular group of regulars. Many of those pub's assemblies of drinkers have not been the traditional idyll of flat-capped locals. Some, like the villagers who ganged together to buy the Old Crown in the Lake District, have been from central casting, but most were merely like-minded souls who love and are loved by what they consider to be their local boozer.

A pub for the palace household

Take the Two Brewers behind Windsor Castle. It is a pub for the palace household to get away from lickspittle living with Royals. The pub allows its walls to be covered with wryly-captioned photographs, postcards from official tours and jokes about the Windsors. I liked the snap of German-born Princess Michael of Kent at the Battle of Britain Memorial fly-past on to which some wag, in a balloon from her mouth, had scrawled the words 'Achtung Spitfire'. And there is a formal framed photograph presented by the Earl and Countess of Wessex, which the locals have captioned 'The Royal Couple savouring a view of the Two Brewers', which made me laugh.

Then there is Sweeney & Todd, a pie shop within key-throwing distance of the grim, redbrick Reading police station. Through an unassuming back door of the English charcuterie is a pub with a well-stocked narrow bar on one side and curtained booths opposite. It exists to look after the local Flying Squad, allowing them to eat pies and drink whisky without any hassle from the bad guys. St Stephen's Tavern in Westminster is the politicians' equivalent that is decked out with green leather banquettes with more brass than the Labour front bench. It offers its regulars hot air and a parliamentary division bell.

In Wiltshire the Barge Inn services 'croppies', those anoraks who believe that aliens are responsible for crop circles. In the back of the scruffy 18th-century stone tavern, that is so well hidden you need a UFO to find it, is a room dedicated to the phenomenon. On the wall is an Ordnance Survey map marking out both current and historic circles next to a notice board offering practical services for the enthusiast. So many classic circles have been discovered near the pub that some might wonder whether its locals are small, green and speak like Daleks.

Gin and jag club for racers

Gerry Stonhill's Individual Mason Arms in Oxfordshire caters for those to whom 'a few quid' is a mere bagatelle. It is a gin and jag club for the racing world, an alcoholic pit stop for the tanned rally driver and the classic car enthusiast. He serves the motor racing community by arranging for them to arrive by helicopter and refusing to allow children, dogs, mobile phones or vegetarians into his establishment. Meanwhile he encourages heavy smoking and hard drinking and acquires the rarest of wines for his discerning community. He regaled me with his current tale of 'a shunt in the Aston outside Chateau Laville Haut-Brion' to acquire 'the last couple of cases of the '79' for his special customers.

Outside the Three Horseshoes in Somerset there's an old MG car, not there simply as a shrine to the two-seater twin-cam double-de-clutch bone-shaker that once turned sensible coves into Stirling Mosses, but as a signal that the pub is the headquarters of the MG owners club. Inside are black and white glossies of the mechanical beasts and display cases of 1950s and '60s Dinky Toys. There are steering wheels on the walls, sets of Castrol oil jugs on shelves and a restored petrol pump circa Carry On Nurse in a dark corner of the back bar-room. The landlord has turned his hostelry into the spiritual home for men who love oily rags.

Beer and sausage festival

Meanwhile, the Queen's Head in Cumberland holds a month-long annual beer and sausage festival for locals to savour the county's superior cylinder of mince and seasoning. It has more than 20 varieties of local banger on its menu and an equal number of local beers. On Sundays its sausages are roasted and served with roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding.

I have long loved the Rose and Crown in Oxford, which supports its home university by fining anybody who mentions 'the other place' (Cambridge University) and raises money for local charities by running the Dongola Racing Club (six people paddling a punt, ostensibly 'hurrying' to the relief of Khartoum). And I liked the Gaggle of Geese in Dorset. It does its bit for good causes by giving away the profits from bi-annual poultry auctions. Its locals are fanciers who flock there from three counties to bid for the geese, goslings, leghorns, Bantams, silkies and Rhode Island Reds.

Earlier this year I was reviewing pubs in the West Country. I visited three pubs within 20 miles of each other in a 24-hour period. Each provided a different service to its community. At Woods Bar and Dining Room in Dulverton, Somerset, the landlord made a point of buying only local meat to support his local farming community many of whom are still struggling from the 2001 foot and mouth crisis. When I complimented him on one of the strongest-tasting, thickest and best organic sirloin steaks I had ever eaten he pointed to a sitting figure and said 'tell him - he's the butcher'. It was a measure of the pub's importance that the purveyor of the ruby red steak I was eating was also tucking into a bloody piece of beef at twice the price he had originally sold it to the pub.

Two fingers for New Labour

MA|06/10/2005|6|Pub card offers 'rip off' |students says Martin

by MA Reporter

JD Wetherspoon chairman Tim Martin is claiming students in Wolverhampton and elsewhere are being duped by pubs offering discount cards.

He has claimed the cards, which offer students cheaper drinks, are misleading.

Martin insists students in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, get better value at his Moon Under Water outle