8 ms·

People who've never spent significant time in the UK may not appreciate the significance that pbus have played in the UK culture and social structure. Pubs have

• zimpenfish 4y ago
  > probably conciding with the rise of Internet culture and online connectedness Possibly also related to the greater ease of accessing, e.g., sports on TV compared with 10-15 years ago - now you don't need a satellite dish etc., you can just stream Sky Sports over the internet which cuts out the need to find a pub showing whatever match you wanted (assuming you're not doing it as a social activity.)
• selimthegrim 4y ago
  You should try visiting New Orleans.
• bencollier49 4y ago
  Pubs were closing long before the internet appeared, albeit in smaller numbers. The main driver, in my opinion, is specialisation. We've got a much more professional workforce these days, with more specialist skills, who for this reason often have to travel for some distance to get to their places of work. That means far less time to go to the pub. Combined with modern media, it's just easier to sit indoors. People have posted other points elsewhere on this thread - they're all contributing (plus drink driving laws and smoking bans). I mean, a lot of people used to stop working at lunchtime and spend the afternoon in the pub. Now, if home working holds up, and then inflation abates a bit, perhaps pubs might regain an advantage, but I fear we're now in a new "steady state", and it'd take more to change things back.
  • calvinmorrison 4y ago
    25c beers, air conditioning and a color TV that always had the Phils on, yeah our local pub was always packed during the baseball season.
    • jmharvey 4y ago
      Out of curiosity, when was that? The last time I was in a place with 25c beers, I was watching the 2001 Daytona 500.
• OJFord 4y ago
  > UK pub culture doesn't tend to be that intentional about meeting particular people but rather hanging out where others may or may not show up. Interesting, other than 'the locals' propping up the bar, that's not my experience at all. I think going to each other's homes (on a smaller scale and in a less organised way than 'a party') is more common now. For whatever reason, I wouldn't like to say, could be fashion, could be the other side of 'the pub is too expensive', or something else.
  • Atheros 4y ago
    I want to raise another contributor: volume. At most bars in large cities, if I'm in a group of six people, I can not hear someone talking who isn't sitting directly next to me. The parent commenter said "Take something like the bar in [the television show] How I Met Your Mother. Obviously this is all fictional and these characters spend a lot of time there". The only reason they can meet there and hear each other is because the bar is silent and they're actually on a sound stage. Watch any show where any characters interact at a bar: they talk comfortably in a way that would not work in real life. Bars and restaurants have simply gotten measurably louder to the point where people are choosing to meet at home instead. When English Pubs and U.S. speakeasies became popular, amplified music was not a thing. Even the name "speakeasy" comes from the fact that people could and did speak quietly in the bars! > But consider a 1993 study of about a dozen dining establishments, which found that sound levels peaked at 68 decibels (a little louder than normal chitchat). Compare that with a much larger 2018 survey of New York City restaurants, in which one-quarter hit at least 81 decibels (more like a garbage disposal), the average level was 77, and just 10 percent were 70 decibels or below. The report deemed those “quiet.” https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/restaurant-noise-levels-solutions/ https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/restaurant-noise-lev... Scientific papers abound https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=86590 https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=... > There are increasing numbers of reports from patrons complaining about the difficulty in conversing with fellow diners due to loud venues. In Zagat’s 2016 Annual Survey, when surveyors were asked what irritated them the most about dining out, noise was the second highest complaint (25%) behind poor service (28%). But in major urban cities of San Francisco, Boston, Portland and New York City, noise was the number one complaint [34]
• xyzzy123 4y ago
  IMHO an under-appreciated side effect of rising property values is the destruction of third places (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place), a role that pubs often filled in the UK. As land values rise the pressure to make a return on any given space goes up. Leads to fewer places to "hang out" without strong pressure to spend money.
  • OscarCunningham 4y ago
    Damn. Working from home I don't even have a second place.
    • cletus 4y ago
      And with skyrocketing rents and house prices, hanging on that first place presents a challenge.
      • astrange 4y ago
        Land value tax would solve this.
        • seoaeu 4y ago
          Perhaps in the very long term. But drastically increasing taxes on property would certainly not improve things for home owners who'd still have to keep paying their mortgage as well. And even renters would likely find their landlord passing on much of the taxes...
          • astrange 4y ago
            The solution for low-income groups we want to protect (like retirees in their primary home) is generally to defer the tax until their home is sold. And ideally it would reduce their cost of living for other reasons, since land value near them would be deflated and properties would be improved so there's more workers in the area, there's less reliance on other regressive taxes like sales tax, etc.
• codeulike 4y ago
  ... pbus ... eyars ... - typed while in the pbu, clearly
• adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  > You wouldn't even go to drink necessarily but just go by default because that's what everyone else was doing. Price, health aspects, time (when two people work full time, fitting in hours of drinking is harder) and possibly good availability of alternative neuro-affective substances aside, I think this is the actual "problem" pubs have now. Not long ago, in living memory even of millennials, "going down the local" was literally your only option in a lot of rural and suburban places. People just have things to do with friends these days that tickle the dopamine centres more than cheap beer, dirty toilets and sticky carpets. Phones, games, thousands of hours of TV and films, hacking on Linux kernel drivers over Discord, whatever. You don't even have to always physically meet up any more to hang out, and you certainly don't have to pay by the minute for telecoms any more. Once the network effect of "that's just where my mates are going to be" is gone, so are you.
• acjohnson55 4y ago
  When I studied abroad in Wales, it was literally the only thing to do in the evening. We had no TV. We didn't even have wifi at first (they added it a few weeks into the term). The student village wasn't a short walk from anything of interest. Everyone hung at the pub at the center of the student village.
  • tomcam 4y ago
    I’m a nondrinker but that sounds great
    • WastingMyTime89 4y ago
      Lived something fairly similar in the UK a decade ago. It was great especially when you consider how pubs are organised. The place makes it very easy to come and go and as service is at the bar and you can order both food and alcohol you don’t really feel pressured into drinking. That’s the part of the UK culture I miss the most.
• cercatrova 4y ago
  I've heard this is because homes in the UK are comparatively smaller than in the US, so UKers go to pubs and other Third Places while Americans meet at their houses.
  • nicoburns 4y ago
    That and pubs and 3rd spaces are closer. I have a pub 30 second walk from my house. Probably 10 within a 20 minute radius (walking).
    • cercatrova 4y ago
      Indeed. In the US, unless you live in a city or a suburb with shopping complexes within walking distance, you have to drive to a pub.
  • vinay427 4y ago
    I’m sure it’s one factor but probably not a defining characteristic. There are several countries with more similar home sizes to the UK in continental Europe that at least anecdotally seem to prefer meeting in homes, sometimes even more than in the US.
• sirodoht 4y ago
  Interesting to note the etymology, as well. Pub comes from "public house"; a house for the public.
• secretsatan 4y ago
  It's not just that pubs have to pay more for real estate, so do all their customers, and house prices have long outpaced wages in the UK. This will affect the younger generations more, but I always see it framed as "Young people just don't go out like they used to", rather than, "Young people have less disposable income and can't afford to go out like they used to"
• dan-robertson 4y ago
  Regarding the land prices argument, I think there are a reasonable number of buildings which must be run as pubs and may not be e.g. converted to more lucrative uses. Though the local economy does influence the prices that must be paid for labour and the prices customers will be willing to pay. I expect you’re more likely to do well as a pub by having e.g. a wide rotating selection of beers rather than trying to compete with spoons on price. A separate issue may be rent. The pub in my parents’ village was owned and successfully run by some locals for a while until they wanted to retire and sold it to a large company. That company would then lease the pub to people who would either fail to do well (and cause the village to get fed up with the pub) or do well only to have the owning company turn around and try to increase rents (and offer those people no reasonable path by which they might come to own the pub themselves), driving them away by making the business unsustainable.
• wyclif 4y ago
  The article doesn't mention it, but another consideration regarding change in the UK is demographics. In areas of London where there has been an influx of Muslim immigrants, the local pubs tend to close down due to lack of demand.
  • School-Cotton 4y ago
    Muslims are less than 5% of the UK population, so Islam can at most account for only a small part of the decline.