7.0 Property Tycoons

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 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.

Figure 10 - Ownership of UK public houses (in thousands), 1990 to 2018.

Pub closures should not be considered as the fall of a British institution, rather a returning of it to the hands of the speculative builder. We must remind ourselves of the way that developers in Victorian England would systematically build and close pubs as a device for unlocking land and generating profit. Girouard notes that ‘a builder who built a pub and installed himself as the licensee usually sold it after a year or two, or even sooner, either to another publican, or, less often, to a brewery.’ 31 Yet the developers of the early 21th century have no desire to keep building pubs, rather the opposite. Housebuilding developers will only include community facilities such as pubs on new build housing estates when forced to do so through obligations such as Section 106 agreements. Evidently pubs are no longer a necessary part of profitable housing development.

29 30 31

Hutt. Hutt. Girouard.