Business Opinion

Civilisation is around the corner

One way to look at the development of pubs in the past decade is to borrow a word often used by Mike Bramley, the head of Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) pubs and bars division.

Bramley talks about how trends have been "civilising" the pub. He doesn't mean to suggest that pubs had been some kind of Mad Maxian outpost of anarchists and barbarians. Well, not exactly. Bramley is talking about how usage of pubs has been broadening beyond treating them as traditional male bastions for serious consumption of beer.

As heavy-duty necking of beer has declined, pubs have welcomed more mixed usage by families, older customers and women. The pub has been moving quickly along an evolutionary curve, towards a more natural dynamic involving balanced food and drink usage. By natural, I mean that really heavy consumption of alcohol is a kind of cultural quirk in the UK.

My colleague, the beer writer Roger Protz, will talk about workers in heavy industry having to replace liquids at the end of shifts to explain historical antecedents.

But it's about more than this. Heavy drinking - weekend-led binge-drinking - still goes on. That's the reason why the circuit is still a profitable place to trade and heavily wet-led, high-energy trading concepts exist.

Why large groups of single-sex drinkers move like flocks of starlings from bar to bar at speed is unfathomable. (It's the saddest thing in the world to hear someone declare that their plan for the evening is to "get trolleyed".)

Although the circuit slice of the industry remains off-kiltered by short-hours heavy drinking, it is becoming increasingly out-of- line with the broader industry. The sector has done an outstanding job in deepening its offer (to be fair, this is a trend also in evidence in the high street, to a lesser extent).

Bramley's company, M&B, has been leading the re-positioning trends, moving its brands up the civilising curve as it caters for a gamut of social groups wanting a broad-based quality food-and-drink offer from their pubs.

Last week, Bramley took me to a couple of new Cornerstone concepts where, as ever, the aim is about "meeting tomorrow's expectations today". Cornerstone is about introducing a broader offer into very heavily wet-led community pubs - and as many as 50 to 60 sites could be moved across to it in the coming few years.

Its natural customer-base is blue-collar - slightly more so than Sizzling Pub Company, the value-dining but wet-led chain now at 200 sites. Cornerstone has a value-driven menu, zoned areas catering for its core drinking customers (who account for 70% of turnover before conversion) and newly-arrived family groups, women and "greys" looking for other things - food, quality coffee, cask ale, and comfy, well-lit surroundings - from their pub.

Post-conversion, food sales jump to 20% of turnover. Cornerstone sites perform the key trick required to create a pub's sustainable and profitable future - they recruit casual-use customers. The number of people using these pubs once a week jumps from 200 to 600. One site we visited, the Crown & Anchor in West Bromwich, Birmingham, where takings have trebled, had a hearteningly busy mixed crowd of ladies, older customers, families and old-style lunchtime drinkers.

Bramley thinks the smoke-ban will accelerate civilising trends: food sales could jump to as high as 30% in three years.

Fascinatingly, my tour included time with operations director Jeremy Skingley and locals pubs marketing director Andy Portsmouth. From Skingley have come the operational insights to develop Cornerstone, while Portsmouth has contributed what might be called intellectual underpinning.

Portsmouth, whose concept statement for Cornerstone is "rooted humanity", explained how its customers are community-centred - the concept makes a point of "landlording" with a prominent position for its licensees on menus and offers reassuring community-focused cues with nostalgic pictures of the locality. All in all, it's pretty brilliant stuff.

M&B boss Tim Clarke recently described pubs as a "uniquely-positioned asset class". Driving round Birmingham's sizeable M&B pubs located at key junctures serving sizeable communities, you see what he means. No other retail offer is as well-placed to compete.