Last Orders? Inside Britain’s Pub Crisis and the Rise of the Micro Pub

Is Britain calling last orders on one of its most iconic institutions?

In this episode, Danni and Si pull up a chair and explore the story behind the British pub crisis. From Roman taverns and medieval ale houses to Victorian gin palaces and modern locals, they trace how pubs became far more than places to grab a drink. They became the heart of communities, friendships, celebrations, and everyday life.

But why are so many disappearing?

Danni and Si unpack the complex mix of rising business rates, soaring energy costs, alcohol duty, supermarket competition, changing drinking habits, and shifting attitudes towards alcohol that have left thousands of pubs struggling to survive.

The conversation also looks at the innovative ways the industry is fighting back. From micro pubs and brewery tap rooms to community-owned venues, new models are emerging that put connection and local identity back at the centre of the experience.

Along the way, they discuss the role of chains like Wetherspoons, the balance between affordability and authenticity, and what happens to communities when their social spaces disappear.

Funny, nostalgic, and surprisingly thought-provoking, this episode asks a simple question: when a pub closes, what are we really losing?

Grab a brew and join the conversation.

About Simon and Danielle:

Simon and Danielle are both business owners, based in the East Midlands, who met through mutual business contacts and who share a love of all things business. 

Simon runs Skylight Media – Award-winning experts in Website Design, E-commerce & Marketing running since 2003.

Danielle runs Goldspun Support – a multi-faceted support service for fractional directors and small business owners across the globe, running since 2009.

Since they first met Simon and Danielle have spent a ridiculous amount of time talking about the subjects that interest them – usually over a drink in the pub – and they decided that now was the time to bring these conversations to a wider audience and invite them to join the chat. 

Both Simon and Danielle are successful business owners in their own rights with big plans for the future but will never lose their love of talking all things business… and the pub.

Transcript

Hi, I'm Dani,
and I'm Si. Welcome to Business in the Brew, a podcast dedicated to Winds business with the occasional cover.
We take a business story, theory, or something we just want to chat about. Indeed, adjusting on our own special personality and sense of humor, combined with our experience and knowledge, both business graduates and have run our own businesses for many years. We can't make them to listen, and this is legitimately one we could be putting in the pub, but unfortunately we're not in the pub, we're in the studio, but we go to the pub afterwards, because we're getting towards the end of the day,
and in case anyone thinks that we kind of rehearse this, we don't. Danielle is actually genuinely telling me this story for the first time ever. All I know is it's about pubs, pubs.
Yes, I called it last orders. So it's about the British pub crisis, basically. But interestingly, there is like a, like a positive element to the pub story. The actual pub story makes me very sad, because, like, I grew up, like, when I was 17 with my thing ID, I totally went to the pub, and I've been going to the pub, and I think it's a cultural thing, I love the chat and the laughter and the atmosphere, and I genuinely miss that smell. You know, the smell of a pub during a
love style bear COVID
liquor beer, Matt. No, don't do that, gross. But anyway, at its peak, England and Wales had around 60,000 pups by 2024 That figure was closer to 44,000
Oh, good grief. On
average, we are losing roughly 50 pubs a month.
That's a stunning figure. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, right. I do remember some figures being thrown around at one point, probably about 10 years ago. It's literally a pub, a pub of weeks closing. Oh, sorry, pub a days closing. Yeah,
it's, it's, yeah, it's yes, probably slightly more than that now. It's just,
yeah,
it for me personally, because it's part of the culture I grew up with. Yeah, it's devastating.
Well, I think it's a part that a lot of people grew up with.
Yes,
yeah, yeah, because they are there, they're just there as part of the community, they are, and
that's that's the kind of the thing. It's not just about losing real estate, you're losing community, literally community centers, but you're losing a community connection, a meeting place, a mental health resource for some people, maybe not if you're an alcoholic, you know what I mean, a piece of local identity, but if you walk into a brewery tap room on a Thursday night and you can't get a seat, or the micro pub two streets away from the clothes where the spoon has a three month waiting list, you'll see that there is an element of pub culture that's still alive, but in a very different iteration, so kind of like death to one half slash life to another, so as I said before, the pub is arguably Britain's greatest social institution. Yeah, baby,
even greater than the Wi,
yes,
right?
For me personally, more embedded in daily life than the church, more democratic than the golf club, more affordable than the restaurant. It's got roots going back to Roman Tabernae through medieval air houses, Georgian coaching in Tabernacle, that's what that says. Tabernacle, she can put your glass on to read it, because I pronounced
it. Oh, it is. Yeah,
thank you. Which is
where tavern comes from. Yes, yeah,
do that list again now, because you ruined it. Roman Tabernacle, medieval ale houses, Georgian coaching inns, Victoria gym palaces, 20th century social clubs, all of those. They are the model of the pub as it's evolved through time. Camera
taking bits, exactly. And you know,
Camera, the campaign for Real Ale, founded in 1971 has spent over 50 years documenting and fighting the homogenization of British beer and the closure of British
absolutely did, and they've done their job.
Yeah, and for much of that period, they were fighting the pubco model, so the large property companies owning pub estates and renting them out to landlords, which I know there are some particular pubcos you're not a massive fan of. Yes, not a, not a huge fan. And you get to the door and you're like, no, this is one of those, and I'm like, okay, we'll go elsewhere. Yeah, but I know they'll have Malibu, so please can we go back and the industrial largo that was replacing Region Layles today, the threats are more numerous and fundamental than that. It's not just those two, those two things. So, why aren't the pubs actually closing, and the causes are layered? You've got business rates, you've got property tax on commercial premises, punishing pubs, essentially, which need that large floor area to, you know, seat the people, but they operate on incredibly thin margins. A pub at a town center can pay 10s of 1000s in rates annually, while the off license next door pays a fraction. Utility costs have surged, you know, and you bear in mind you need a cold seller, multiple refrigeration units, commercial catering equipment, a large heated space to make pubs extremely energy intensive, all. All of that is going to cost you money. Smoking ban in 2007 had a massive impact. It removed profitable outdoor smoking gardens from pubs that didn't have the space to create one,
but it also introduced people back into pubs that didn't. It did. Yeah, so
there'll always be about the
pubs, because they didn't exactly, coming away smelling to
spray my hair with the breeze. And then alcohol duty, UK beer, UK duty on beer is among the highest in Europe, making every pint at the bar more expensive to poor than competitors across the channel. If you layer on top of that the cost of living crisis, which suppressed destruction, you spending people just simply stop going out as often.
Yeah, add to that was also wages increasing, yeah, I mean, the margins are tight
anyway, but increasing wage costs will do that too, and there are some other things I'll come on to later, like generational things. Then you had, like, the PubCo problem we talked about, so the tide house model, or a landlord rents the pub from a large property company, they're required to buy the beer, well, they're required to buy the beer from that pubco or brewery at above market rates, you're not allowed to shop around free market rates, no agentic shopping for these people, and it's been enormously controversial. So, pub crows like Punch Taverns and Enterprise Inns grew massively in the 2000s taking on huge debt to buy the pub estates to start with, and when the financial crisis hit in 2008 many of them became distressed because they'd outlaid way more than they were to claw back. Tide landlords found themselves paying above market rent and above market beer prices with tiny margins to start with. It was
interesting how they used to recruit as well. They wanted inexperienced landlords, but they could train and effectively influence and subordinate grooming,
yeah. pub code adjudicator was introduced in 2016 to regulate this relationship, but the fundamental tension remains large property companies whose interests don't always align with the communities their pubs serve, you know, that will always, that will always be the case, whatever you bring in. So, there's also a change in customer,
yeah,
so the demographics of drinking have shifted substantially. So, millennials and Gen Z drink less alcohol than previous generations, not dramatically so, but meaningfully so. They drink less frequently, but spend more per occasion when they do. We're binges,
yeah, yeah,
more interested in premium quality, provenance, and experience. More likely to be interested in alcohol-free options. There's a lot of sober curious people, also more likely to have
sober curious. I know
a home cinema streaming subscription, games console, at home cocktail kit. So the competition for leisure time and the spend has never been fiercer.
And I forgot, I forgotten this, because this is a litany. It's a long list. And did you mention supermarkets and the rise of the supermarket, and how much beer they sell,
not as much, because
vast range.
Yeah, but in theory, the on-trade and off-trade, in theory, shouldn't compete, but they
do, because of the in-home choosing to stay at home, because
you've got a streaming service, and you want to watch the latest Spider-Man, or whatever it is, you get a bottle of wine to watch with it. You want to make yourself an ice meal at home, you know, you get, you get something to have with it, so while the on and off trade tensions already existed, and if you don't know what that means, on trade means drinking on site, off trade means drinking off of the site where you bought it, so drinking at home, it does have a massive impact. Just in case you didn't know, I don't doubt you knew.
No, no, I meant, thank you for on behalf of the listeners,
and the other one, Gen Alpha, so that's 2012 to 2024 Are they projected to be the most sober generation yet? They believe in moderation, health, they're sober curious, alcohol free, and digital socialization means that they haven't got the need for the pubs, they don't need to physically go meet someone in real life, because they're playing Scrabble on, because they've
adjusted. Yeah, they have completely. There are
alternatives, there's a coffee shop culture. There just isn't the same need for getting pissed in a field that coffee
prices are going to be near the part of a price of a pint soon,
probably. Yeah, so there's that whole generational, the changing customer, the way that's all evolving. And then you've got the micro pub revolution kind of layered into that, so the big format pubs like the spoons and like your big pub codes and stuff are being sort of replaced by that descending customer with a micro pub,
that's right.
So, in 2005 a former camera activist named Martin Hillier converted a former fishmonger shop in Hearn, Kent, into a tiny pub, no TV, no music, no fruit machines, no lager on tap, just cask ale served in a space smaller than most living rooms.
Yeah,
that's your idea in heaven, isn't it?
What it is, and you know what happens with those, they tend to gravitate, or have a grab, the gravitation of a of a community towards them, so, so you'll have a much more loyal and much more diverse, and often size one
is if it's that tiny. This is just a question, actually. Don't know the answer, and this has got nothing to do. Does it create a click, because you'll get those together, and no one else can fit in the door, and if someone else walked in, you'll be like, 'What the hell are you doing at our pub?
I wouldn't say clique would it. Leak exists other than it's obvious who the regulars are when you go into all those places. Yes, yeah, and that's the, that's the case in most pubs, but in that small confined space you can't escape it. Yes, you can't escape it, but that doesn't mean to say that they're not welcoming, because they all, they always are, you know, because they just want that little pub to be there forever now. Yeah, so if it takes someone else
coming in and having adopted
it, yeah, and I know that from actual experience, because
you've got a couple of micro pubs, you do
several of those, yeah.
So the Butcher's Arms, which is that money opened in Hearn, is regarded as Britain's first micro pub,
really. Wow,
I know. And then, so that was 2005 first micro pub by 2024 so I can do the maths. 19 years later, no. Yes, 19 years later, there are over 700 micro pubs across the UK, and they work because they strip the cost to the bare bone. There's no chef, there's no large staff in 21 years. Is it the other way?
You say 2000 542
1005 to 2024
2000 oh 224 Sorry, yeah, yes, it is 19.
My maths is usually bad, so I accept you questioning me anyway. No chef, no large staff, low square footage in a night seller, pork pie, or some scratchings, but it's not - it's not a food offering. They serve a carefully curated product to a devoted local following and after something large, pub shade simply cannot, so genuine community and conversation. Yeah, and in a room that small, that conversation is evolving everyone. That's not private, you don't go there for your first day. Well, you might, I suppose many are run by people
for approval.
God, can you imagine the fear of walking into your partner's micro pub and everyone turning around looking at you like God, whatever you choose, you're going to be judged on what you are. Just awful. Anyway, many are run by people who have taken redundancy or early retirement and want to run the pub they always wished existed. I know you've talked about it before with one of your friends owning something like this that is the pub you want, and the micro pub movement is proof that the pub, as a concept isn't dead,
no, it's definitely a movement,
but the unviable pub is dead.
I would agree with that. Yeah, a pub that isn't offering anything different, a pub that isn't offering anything to the community, and actually being part of that community. This is where some certain things have happened recently. There's a, there's a place, actually a brilliant little pub called Ship Inn in Port Low in Cornwall, tiny little fishing village. Over, I think it's 80% of the village. The houses are owned by people who don't live there. Yes, you've got 20% of people left to that shouldn't be allowed. Use the pub, use the pub, but the pub wasn't actually making any money. It was owned by the local brewery, so the brewery put it on the market, but all the regulars, sorry, all the locals included property owners in the village,
yeah,
who kind of knew that if that pub disappeared, that local, that would be a problem, would be a problem for them to be renting their properties out as well, and you'd lose value on those, so they all chipped in and bought this little pub, and it's thriving.
See, that I love,
yeah. There was absolutely.. it's a movement when that kind of thing happened.
And I mean, it's a little bit different in the city center, isn't it? Where you've got 12 pubs to choose from,
yeah.
But, yeah, with little communities like that. Anyway, the craft beer explosion created a new kind of drinking venue, which is the brewery tap room. So, this is not a micro pub. This is something different again. Yeah, so rather than wholesaling beer through pubs and losing margin at pretty much every step of the supply chain, breweries realize they could sell direct to consumers from their own space. Absolutely, the margins are dramatically better. The brand experience is totally
to augment stuff that they're selling for it. Yes. Well, we,
where did we go to? Was it called the light? What's it called? The light something in Nottingham,
one down by the river, yeah, yeah, I can't remember, can't remember it's called, but actually, yes, they have their own brewery on, so yeah,
you've got the brewery, but then you've also got pretty much two bottles of wine, and that's
it.
This is not the kind of place to go if you are a gin drinker, or if you're like a, I don't know, Bacardi Breezy drink after they said there's that still made, but
who knows,
you've got to love Kraft Ale. You've got to love brewing at its source. You've got to, you've got to be open to trying lots of different things. It's not for the, I don't know how to say politely, unrefined palette, which is mine. It's
hardly refined.
I'll happily say it's mine, because I get very upset when I can't have Malibu. I will drink wine, I will drink gin, but I would prefer Malibu. And I think pretty much out of the 20 episodes we've recorded lately, I've said Malibu about 15 times
when then we're not even sponsored by
maybe we should reach out to them, they'd love that, wouldn't they? Anyway, so you're drinking beer literally from the tank it came from, you're surrounded by that, you're immersed in it, so the tap room is the pub, kind of reimagined around the product, so again an evolution
that is often how it happens, and actually what they, what they do is typically, and where I suppose that was in the States, you would have an amazing brewery that had an amazing reputation around the local area, they couldn't get distribution out of state, and what they chose to do is to then. Bring people into the brewery. Yes, because the whole brewery test, the destination, and the brewery itself, the experience,
it's a bit like when you do a tour of the Guinness factory, isn't it? Then drink at the top in Ireland,
yeah, but that's
a commercialized,
totally, yeah, yeah. And they've got some toast, brewery down the down in Cornwall, actually, that has a brilliant brewery experience there, and I don't mean just you go round the brewery, because once you clean round one, you know how they work, but it's actually the food and the tasting and the
education that's
where that, that's where, that's where people get really excited. I
drove past one the other day, there's one in Hampshire, there's always been a vineyard there, but next door there's now a, I want to say pig bush, but I think I made that up, there's a brewery next door, just fascinating. You'd have a right little drunken pub, not pub, pub crawl in a bus, because the new forest is quite big. Anyway,
they're springing up everywhere, basically. Yes, can
pubs be saved is the question. So, there is a legal mechanism under Localism Act 2011 so assets of community value, the ACVs, yeah, that allows local communities to list their pub and trigger a right to bid when it comes up for sale. It
doesn't give the community the right to buy, but it creates a six month moratorium on sale, giving time to raise the funds.
Yeah,
so the Ivy House in Nunhead, South London, was the first pub in England to be saved this way, converted into a community community cooperative in 2013 Yeah, still open and thriving, and there are now hundreds of these, these community-owned pubs across the UK, because the model works. You convert the pub from a property asset serving a landlord to a community asset serving the neighborhood, and automatically it becomes, it has a different place in people's hearts.
It does,
so we're not alone in seeing this trend in the UK. So, German beer halls, for example, I'm going to say the actual word, gestatin. Then are experiencing the same closures as British pubs. Germany has lost over 50,000 pubs and restaurants between 2000 2020 because the older generation that sustained the regular stramish, so the regular tables, the culture is aging out, and then young Germans aren't replacing them,
aging out. I sound like tapping out. It
does a little bit. Yeah, the American dive bar, cheap, unpretentious, and community-focused, is having a crisis moment,
is it?
Yeah. So, in New York, rising rents have wiped out 1000s of venues that have survived for decades, and in many US cities, craft beer bars, cocktail lounges, you know that that different experience have just taken over.
Wow.
And again, the debate in the US mirrors that that we have in this country with gentrification of drinking a net positive, or does it exclude people who needed cheap, accessible community venues?
That's right.
Weirdly,
the
contradiction to every role, spoonies.
Yeah,
because Weather Spoons does break the mold, because it is a massive estate, but it's still thriving, because it's affordable, because it's accessible. It's doing something you can buy a
pint at half past eight in the morning,
that too. There's nothing better than a pint with your fry up, but it's, you know, the dive bars in America might be going, but here, where the spoons are absolutely thriving alongside, alongside a cocktail bar, you know, if I go on a night out, I probably will pop into a spoons and have a few, because you can get relatively leathered cheaply, and then you move on to the cocktail bar, where it costs you a lot of money to get re-leathered.
Your class is showing spoons, I think they're a
really, really clever model, their business model, what their business model is pretty much cheap beer, no music, no sport. It's actually quite close to the micro pub. There's no TV in there, there's no music in there, there's no pretension in
there,
literally zero pretension. Every cross-secular side is in a spoon, but they're just really interesting. But I mean, they are struggling a little bit recently, like the one local to us is closing. There will be closures, declining profits, but it's partly a cost of living story, more than an unsuccessful business model.
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, that's definitely happening.
So, I just think it's really interesting. Everything is changing. It's like what you knew growing up, what you knew as your standard Friday night out, the aspirational, where you're going to get to when the kids are growing up and go to the pub every Saturday. It's just changed so much
totally, everything's fragmented. Are choices increasing, or do you think choices are becoming narrower?
I think choices are increasing, but within a narrower window. window, so yes, there are now 600 bottles of wine you can choose from, because it's imported from all over the world. There are now 17 proseccos instead of
one. Yeah,
but it's still wine or prosecco,
right? So this is a kind of like this, it's like the phallus, the fallacy that we have more choice than we've ever had before, but actually, from fewer providers, yeah,
that there is more choice,
yeah, but you've got to look for it, that's the thing, isn't it? You've got to dig,
and you've got to know what the difference
is, yeah, yeah, that's right, you've got to be open to the difference as well. So I know if I go into a new town that I've not been to before, I want to search up places that are tucked away around. Back streets. Yes, I don't want to go. You don't want
the mainstream pub.
No, because I know equally if I go
and stay somewhere for a weekend with the kids, the first thing I'll do is find a Wetherspoons, because we can get breakfast there really cheaply, or dinner there really cheaply, and satisfy the kids. Yeah, and they're allowed in there. So, you bear in mind we went to Edinburgh or Glasgow, or went to both, but one of them didn't let kids in pubs, most of the pubs would refuse to have children that edits Edinburgh, whereas the spoons don't have that. Yes, you can't have them in past 10 o'clock, but up until that point, you can have your kids in the pub. So,
but no dogs,
but no dogs
generally. I don't have a dog, I just have two children,
but it's just so different. Everything's got a different reason. Don't get me wrong, I love a cocktail bar. When I go to London on the train, I always come into some pancreas, and worry
I wasn't getting any wrong.
Thanks, Cersei Champagne Bar, and have a glass there, because I love the Clicquot, and I can't get it anywhere else. Then I don't need a whole bottle sitting in my fridge, but equally I love Malibu, and equally I will drink an acropoca. My favorite shooter is a jammy dodger, which is what is it? It's what's the round bottle with the gold top chambre topped with Bailey's, tastes like black frost, getter.
There you have it. If you want to send anything in,
not on air. So, yeah, that is the decline of the pubs, and it's made me quite sad, not sad, some of the stuff you say to me, but sad,
but actually just continue it as well. The pubs, the pubs, interesting. What happens to the pubs? I know it's certainly near where I drink, have drunk, and still continue to drink, where every street almost had a pub on it.
Yeah,
which is part of the part of the growth and the industrial revolution, the breweries, local breweries supplying the local pubs that they owned.
Yes,
at the end of an entire terrace of houses, those pubs have all disappeared. They've all been turned into HMOs.
The one, the road I live on, there's a pub on there. Yeah, that's closed,
really.
Beagle, yeah.
Oh, good grief. Is that no HMO or something, or is it Tesco's? Because, so, test Tescos. I've seen faster metros. Yeah,
yeah,
yeah, yeah. So they, they repurpose, but they have taken out a community asset, which is a shame. Just means that they weren't viable, really.
There's a massive one that's on that road near Arts Cophone police station near us, that used to be a huge pub, got turned into one of those Chinese or you can eat buffets, that's always full, apparently that's retain the community element,
not really.
Do you not chat? Yes,
exactly. All right,
maybe not.
Go in, go into a pub and talk to anyone about anything
that's
support your local pub.
Yeah, do that. And also, can we have more? I think more pubs, because if we go to just tap rooms and micro breweries, I'm going to be very freaking thirsty, because I don't drink anything out of either of those. So, if spoons could just keep going for a while until the liver fails completely,
I'm sure they'll manage, thanks. Yeah, thank you very much. You've got me on a lovely subject that I have. It's very close to my house. All right, let's bring
up beer. We're all right. Thanks for supporting us by downloading and listening to this episode. And a massive thank you also to Dawn, Emily, Nat, and Lewis, and the BTD Studios for all your expertise in bringing our podcasting dream to reality.
We'd love it if you commented on this episode, as we'd really like to know what you think and what you might like us to cover in future episodes,
and we'll see you on the next
one. Bye.