These oases are invariably the result of the efforts of committed individuals and not the spurious ‘initiatives’ of regulation-bound national bodies and corporations and their ‘partners’ and ‘stakeholders’ who invariably prefer talking to doing.
One such oasis is the Warwickshire village of Long Itchington. With 2,000 inhabitants this community boasts no less than six pubs — all thriving. This is because the hosts all co-operate together to make sure this happy state of affairs continues with the annual high point being the Long Itchington beer festival.
Now in its fifth year the four-day event goes on over the May bank holiday (4-7 May) with its biggest programme of events ever, not the least of which will be an eve of festival appearance by Publican’s Morning Advertiser columnist Roger Protz.
It’s not as you might suppose an all-freehouse event. Two of the Long Itchington six belong to Charlie Wells and one to Punch, but that doesn’t matter as individual local involvement is there.
Likewise it’s their own beer festival with no beer geeks or fundamentalists dictating the rules. In other words they deliver what ordinary Joes like you and me want.
At a time when we are lamenting the decline of beer consumption and the closure of so many pubs there is a lesson to be learned from the Long Itchington experience; that is, you stand more chance in a village situation where you have a cluster of pubs, rather than as a solo operator.
With two camp sites and the traffic from tourists on the Grand Union canal going through the village, the choice of quality pubs here keeps the visitors moored or camped out for far longer than just one outlet would.
Oddly enough, you would have thought the tourist authority would have been over the moon to get involved, but, of course, it’s government, and they couldn’t care less it seems.
So besides accepting that, as a business we have to go it alone, the other lesson is to realise that fellow hosts are not the competition; in reality it’s anything that diverts people from the pub. Only by co-operating together can we bring our pub culture back to health and,
I firmly believe, our society with it.
Tony Jennings is CEO of Budweiser Budvar UK