Stop panicking about pub closures, says James May
TV presenter and publican James May believes Britain is “oversubscribed” with watering holes and the sector’s struggles are simply “a cull” that will eliminate “bad pubs”.
The former Top Gear host, who owns a half-share in The Royal Oak, in the village of Swallowcliffe in Wiltshire’s Nadder Valley, criticised efforts by the Government to prop up the trade.
He said: “I did a thing on TV a week or two ago about pubs on Newsnight, because another one of those surveys had shown another five million pubs had closed, or whatever.
“I took the view I often take, which is we’re slightly oversubscribed with pubs in the modern world and there’s a bit of a cull going on, and it’s the bad pubs that tend to disappear.
“Really good pubs will always survive because they do nice food, they’ve got a nice atmosphere, they’re clean, they serve nice beer, they’ve got decent wine – all that sort of stuff.”
He added: “One of the things I said, and people got very annoyed with me about it, is that we shouldn’t think of pubs being an essential part of our heritage or an important tradition, or part of our national identity, because they’re not monuments, they’re pubs and they have to work.”
‘Good food, clean toilets’
Speaking as he launched his own range of spirits, called James Gin, May said The Royal Oak, which he co-owns with a businessman friend, was 85 per cent restaurant and 15 per cent drinking establishment.
“Aside from a few corner-of-the-street boozers that have survived and do well, most pubs have to do decent food to be successful,” he said.
“That and clean bogs and all the basic stuff, really. For a long time pubs got away with being a bit tatty and were due a bit of an update.”
He warned against the Government stepping in to save pubs because it “doesn’t really know what it’s doing”.
“For example, their advice on car-buying all turned out to be b-------, really, so I don’t think I want them trying to work out what would save the pub,” May said.
“The good pub will save itself, but I acknowledge it is a massive struggle.”
‘All pubs are good’
However, a spokesman for the Campaign for Real Ale said there was no such thing as a bad pub.
“A remarkable statistic around community-owned pubs is that, to date, they have a 100 per cent success rate,” he said.
“A few have been sold on to the private sector once the business was re-established, but all the rest have survived and thrived.”
In other cases, successful pubs have been converted into housing or shops, simply because owners can cash in by selling to developers.
The rate of hospitality closures is slowing down, from a loss of eight sites per day in 2023 to four a day in the first quarter of 2024, according to new data from industry statistics firm CGA.
But one in 40 venues has closed over the past 12 months, with family-run venues suffering a 22 per cent decline.
And in March, figures from accountants Price Bailey revealed that pub closures had hit a decade high of more than two per day in 2023. Some 769 hostelry operators went bust – up from 518 in 2022.
In total, there were 38,175 pubs in the UK at the end of last year – down from 41,015 a decade earlier, Price Bailey said.
