by Bar de Ness

Created on: June 15, 2009   Last Updated: February 20, 2010

The colloquial view of the English pub is that it quintessentially nestles idyllically in a sleepy hamlet with low oak beams, horse brasses, inglenook rafters and cottage garden scenery.

Here it sits a stone's throw from the village green, and the sounds of cork on willow from a sportsmanly cricket match can be heard to break into the chatter of the locals enjoying their pint on a balmy summer afternoon. It's an image as much a part of England as fish and chips, red routemaster buses, red telephone kiosks, red pillar boxes, bowler hats, pinstripe suits, hackney cabs and cockney newspaper vendors.

It's where the jolly landlord reigns supreme and cares for his customers with all the love of a parent over his brood. Where the locals pop in for a chat and gather to discuss the day with friends and neighbours. Where the visitor can relax with a pork pie, English mustard and a glass of bitter.

Where the red sun sets over the green and verdant vale, when the birds break into twilight song, where the very essence of the community relaxes and wallows in the peace of a fading day, to eventually wander home, content and relaxed.

Reality check! This is but a dream, a vision of a bygone age, nothing more than a postcard of times past, displayed amongst many on a carousal outside a tourist gift shop.

The latest statistics from the British Beer and Pub Association state that 40 pubs are closing every week, and have been on this decline since 2007. The biggest sufferers are towns and villages where the pub was a centre of the community, and many are now mere shells of their former glory.

Along with the village store and the post office, they are yet another victim of government policy which is eradicating the essence of British culture. They are disappearing on a scale unprecedented over hundreds of years.

Pubs that have stood since the sixteenth century, surviving war, famine and industrial exodus, have now surrendered, browbeaten, exhausted and crippled by the very government that should be protecting them.

Those that remain do so by a thread. Some have converted parts of their premises to a post office, shop, or community hall, but each has had to diversify in order to survive. Many have become "Gastro Pubs", leaning more to food than drink and serving up fayre more akin to Mediterranean pallets, offering haute cuisine and pasta dishes accompanied by drinks more grape than grain, barley and hops. Bangers and mash, steak pie and ale, and ploughman's lunch have been replaced

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