7.0
PROPERTY TYCOONS Whilst the State Management Scheme remained in Carlisle until the 1970’s, in the background six large breweries began to dominate and control the country’s remaining public houses. Christopher Hutt tracks the fall in quality of beer and atmosphere in the English pub under the direction of breweries newly employed ‘marketing men’ and ‘the accountants, who view their companies’ pubs as good objects for the application of their property development mentality’ 29. What Hutt reads in the fall of beer quality was actually part of a much larger re-marketisation of England’s social space. A returning of the pub to the 18
speculative developer, but this time to far more powerful companies. Thatcher’s administration, wise to a market dominated by six breweries, introduced new caps on pub ownership to encourage more competition. Ironically, this move by the monopolies commission merely transferred large market shares to newly created pub companies or ‘PubCos’, further consolidating the re-marketisation of the pub. In this case, Snowdon bows to Hutt’s cynical prediction of an industry turned over to ‘property tycoons’.30 The PubCos see each pub as a unit in a wider property portfolio and thus when one pub seems to be less profitable than another it is closed.
