THE REVERED establishments where we love to gather and celebrate long days in the field appear to be joining red-list species with an uncertain future. But the great British pub faces a different kind of threat to curlews and lapwings: rocketing energy and food prices, spiralling living costs, staff shortages, the after-effects of COVID-19 and a shift in the nation’s drinking habits are all cited as reasons for the loss of 383 pubs during the first six months of last year. If that sounds like a lot of boozers down the swanny, 13,000 pub closures since the millennium year – representing a quarter of all British pubs – makes for sober reading indeed, and bad news for those four out of five people who have lost a pub within five miles of their home this century.
Apart from a brief spell in the 1990s, successive residents of the bucolic and off-grid village of Harome in rural North Yorkshire have never known life without a pub of their own. The Starthe culinary map when winning Pub of the Year award more than 40 years ago, and former monk Peter Gascoigne-Mullet, who combined barman duties during the 1980s with being the organist at Castle Howard down the road. During his era the pub built up quite a reputation for gigantic and generous sandwiches, especially those of the curried prawn variety. The headstone of Peter’s partner, Tony Bowron, is the only one in the church graveyard that faces west towards the village pub ‘so he can keep an eye on it’, according to local legend.
