How Cockneyland is losing its locals

I left a match at West Ham United’s ground in East London to find the street outside solid with departing fans and the police announcing over megaphones that Upton Park station was so dangerously overcrowded that it would be closed for some time. Keen to get home, I caught a bus to Canning Town where I could meet up with the Jubilee Line.

My escape route was along the Barking Road and it provided a grim reminder of the terrible toll of pub closures in the East End. When I lived in the area and frequently travelled along the Barking Road, many of the bus stops were named after pubs.

On that match day, I caught a bus to Canning Town at the Boleyn, named after the Boleyn Tavern next to West Ham’s ground. The pub is on CAMRA’s National Inventory of Pubs with Historic Interiors but its future is in doubt when the football club moves to Stratford.

The next major stop along the route is the Green Gate but that pub has gone, along with another on the other side of the road.

I fared better at the next stop, the Abbey Arms. The pub still stands and has clearly enjoyed investment, polished, painted and invitingly lit.

But after that it was a tragic picture of lost hostelries. The Bridge House at Canning Town was once a major venue for live music in the area and featured the likes of Tom Robinson, Depeche Mode, Dire Straits and Chas and Dave. But no music is played there now and no beer is dispensed.

The majestic Royal Oak, proclaiming the pomp and pride of the old East End, is a Grade II listed building. But listing doesn’t stop change of use and the Royal Oak became a betting shop and is now an outlet for Cash Generators, a pay day loan company.

In her crime novel The Cuckoo Calling, J K Rowling, using the pen name Robert Galbraith, describes a meeting between her private eye and a witness in the Ordnance Arms at Canning Town. I don’t know if Rowling visited the pub or merely plucked the name from the internet but the Ordnance Arms, a celebrated pub in its time, is now a charity shop.

Pubs face a grim future in that part of the East End. The season after next, West Ham will depart for the Olympic Stadium in Stratford and it’s likely that more pubs will pull down the shutters for good. Some are busy only on match days, an unsustainable business model and one that will be made worse when there are no matches at all at Upton Park.

I recalled that sad bus ride when I read the interview with Stephen Goodyear, chief executive of Young’s pub company, in the latest issue of BII Business published by the British Institute of Innkeeping. Responding to the fact that 28 pubs a week are closing throughout the country, Goodyear made the point that new pubs are also opening.

He’s right. But where are these new openings? The Kings Arms is about to re-open in St Albans where I now live. It had been an Asian restaurant for many years but is now being restored to its former pub glory.

It’s good news – but St Albans, a small market town, already has 50 pubs. It’s an affluent place, within easy commuting distance of London, and its pubs are busy and successful. There have been just five closures in the years I have lived there.

The extreme view on pub closures was put to me a few years ago by a director of Marston’s. It runs as follows: Britain is “overpubbed”, many of them are poor and deserve to close and the country will end up with around 30,000 pubs that will be “leaner and fitter”.

That’s the “leave it to the market” attitude. It’s one that ignores such values as community and local needs. Pubs are more than betting shops or Tesco Express. People go there to meet friends, enjoy a drink or a meal, read a newspaper or – and this is what makes the British pub so unique and endearing – live music, theatre or even poetry.

The market is driven by profit not community. “Wet pubs” in poor, run-down areas produce low profits and are of no interest to most modern pub companies.

It’s not just the East End of London that is suffering from a blight of closures. The same grim picture holds true for all the former industrial towns and cities throughout the country. I have been to Pontypridd in South Wales and seen street after street of boarded-up pubs as a result of closure of the coal mines and steel works.

Moorhouse’s in Burnley is a mightily successful brewery, producing around 40,000 barrels a year. But it doesn’t sell much beer in Burnley itself where industry has died: the brewery relies on pubs in more affluent parts of the North-west.

Is there a solution? It must be one based on people, not profit. The market must not be allowed to dictate the kind of pubs we have or where they are based. We deserve a better kind of society than that.

Pictured: The Old Rose, one of the great old pubs in the East End, now boarded up and derelict.

*Print version (revised) Publican’s Morning Advertiser 27 November 2014