Our post last week prompted some interesting comments and responses, including a couple which suggested that the market ought to sort it out.
Kien Tan is a retail consultant and analyst and one of the most interesting people we follow on BlueSky. He doesn’t only write about pubs but when he does, it’s in the wider context of retail and hospitality.
His response to our blog post was this:
Pubs already ARE protected. Giving MORE protection than other hospitality IS Reform-coded: a cabinet minister confirmed this to me.You know I love GOOD pubs. But factually we drink out less, so closing BAD pubs will help good ones do better, improve industry standards, and, yes, create more homes.
— Kien Tan (@kientan74.bsky.social) 18 August 2026 at 11:23
This is an established thread in the debate over pub preservation and makes one big assumption: that the pubs which are closing are ‘bad’. Often, they’re not, unless you define quality very specifically and/or narrowly.
In a comment on the blog post Canadian beer writer Gary Gillman said:
The situation you describe suggests demand is there for a new pub. So someone should fill that demand, at another location in your area.
Our instinctive reaction to this was, “Oh, if only it was that easy!” Which then made us pause and think about why, specifically, it is not easy.
New pubs do open, of course, and micropubs have been a notable development on the scene in the past decade or so. If you broaden the definition of ‘pub’ to include brewery taprooms, there are even more. And ‘lounges’ – cafe-restaurants with draught beer and brunch that feel like bourgeois branches of Wetherspoon – might also count. These new types of ‘pub’ seem to be doing well, too, in terms of custom and reputation.
In that sense, the market is doing exactly what Kien and Gary suggest it might: supplying drinking establishments that meet modern needs, in the places where people want and need to find them.
But what they are not, not really, is pubs. Pubs are pubs. And there’s something rather tragic about historic pub buildings that have served communities for centuries being allowed to crumble, rot, fall down, or burn down, while we’re all shunted off to drink in industrial sheds, railway arches or high street retail units that have no real charm of their own.
Putting that aside – brushing it away as mere sentiment and subjectivity – why are new pubs so often pushed into edges and corners in this way?
First, it’s because there are no other spaces. The same pressures and incentives that make property developers who live in London buy up pubs in suburban Bristol also reduce the number of suitable plots or units in these neighbourhoods.
If someone wanted to open a new pub where we live in Barton Hill, East Bristol, their choices would be limited. There’s a run of shops in the basement of a modern housing block, currently occupied by a convenience store and a couple of takeaway restaurants. There’s another convenience store and takeaway combo around the corner. And two more convenience stores and two more takeaways as standalone units. None of these are going anywhere.
When someone did manage to open a new hospitality business in the area, a hipster coffee shop, they only pulled it off by converting their garage without planning permission and then retrospectively getting it signed off after much hoo-ha. And it really is tiny, too – more microscopic than most micro of micropubs.
Let’s assume property and land weren’t at a premium, though, and that there was space to pop in a new pub with seating for, say, 50 people. The next problem would be licensing.
Licences are attached to specific pub buildings. That’s why pub businesses have, until quite recently, persisted in the same locations for decades on end. When breweries wanted to open new pubs between the wars, or after World War II, they had to agree to close existing pubs and transfer the licences, sometimes swapping three or four small pubs for one larger premises.
Micropubs have been able to get licences by agreeing to limited opening hours, often closing early and opening for only a few days a week, and sometimes by convincing councils that their clientele will be middle class, middle aged, and no bother at all.
Which brings us to the next problem: people like the idea of there being a pub nearby, but they don’t want one on their block. All that noise and litter! Comings and goings at all hours! Drunks pissing and vomiting in their rose bushes! When a planning application is made, they will object, and their objections will probably help the authorities take the easiest course of action which is saying “No.”
Keeping an existing pub going is easier than making the case for the insertion of a new one into a community. Whereas no sharp-elbowed homeowners live next door to that railway arch, or factory unit, or row of high street shops.
What stronger protections for pubs might mean is that, rather than a property developer being tempted to close a viable pub in a historic building so they can make millions of pounds building flats, a smaller business (perhaps a community group) might take it on and make just enough. And isn’t enough enough?
In terms of making neighbourhoods feel like communities, commercial property more generally probably needs some of the same protection as pubs. What’s the point in building housing if the people living there can’t buy a pint of milk, a cup of coffee, or a pint? And, of course, the people running those businesses need to be able to make a living, not spend every single penny on rents that an algorithm increases to the theoretical maximum at every opportunity.
