Subjective ramblings about beer, pubs and associated topics

English licencing laws

As I am going to England at the end of next week, I shall be able to report first hand if the more liberal licencing laws for pubs will result in an orgy of drinking and rampaging - or if people just relax a bit more over their last pint for the evening.

It is the proper time to quote George Orwell, who wrote about this issue in the Tribune in 1944:

I note that once again there is serious talk of trying to attract tourists to this country after the war. This, it is said, will bring in a welcome trickle of foreign currency. But it is quite safe to prophesy that the attempt will be a failure. Apart from the many other difficulties, our licensing laws and the artificial price of drink are quite enough to keep foreigners away. Why should people who are used to paying sixpence for a bottle of wine visit a country were a pint of beer costs a shilling? But even these prices are less dismaying to foreigners than the lunatic laws which permit you to buy a glass of beer at half past ten while forbidding you to buy it at twenty-five past, and which have done their best to turn the pubs into mere boozing shops by excluding children from them.

How downtrodden we are in comparison with most other peoples is shown by the fact that even people who are far from being ‘temperance’ don't seriously imagine that our licensing laws could be altered. Whenever I suggest that pubs might be allowed to open in the afternoon, or to stay open till midnight, I always get the same answer: ‘The first people to object would be the publicans. They don't want to have to stay open twelve hours a day.’ People assume, you see, that opening hours, whether long or short, must be regulated by the law, even for one-man businesses. In France, and in various other countries, a cafe proprietor opens or shuts just as it suits him. He can keep open the whole twenty-four hours if he wants to; and, on the other hand, if he feels like shutting his cafe and going away for a week, he can do that too. In England we have had no such liberty for about a hundred years, and people are hardly able to imagine it.

England is a country that ought to be able to attract tourists. It has much beautiful scenery, an equable climate, innumerable attractive villages and medieval churches, good beer, and food-stuffs of excellent natural taste. If you could walk where you chose instead of being fenced in by barbed wire and Trespassers will be Prosecuted’ boards, if speculative builders had not been allowed to ruin every pleasant view within ten miles of a big town, if you could get a drink when you wanted it at a normal price, if an eatable meal in a country inn were a normal experience, and if Sunday were not artificially made into a day of misery, then foreign visitors might be expected to come here. But if those things were true England would no longer be England, and I fancy that we shall have to find some way of acquiring foreign currency that is more in accord with our national character.

Well, it took some years, didn't it. It is ineresting to note that in some areas ouside london, the pubs are still closing in the afternoon. The CAMRA guide to the Cambridge pubs, for excample, lists just a very few that stay open all day.

Posted by: KnutAlbert at 12:48 | link | comments (2)
beer, england, pubs

Comments:

#1  16 November 2005 - 20:41

 

I just came back from London, and I don't think the new licencing hours have been implemented yet. A taxi driver told me that only one or two pubs in every district might stay open after 11 pm. I will be going to London again in December so it will be interesting to hear what you find out.

Anonymous

#2  17 November 2005 - 18:59

 

The new act comes into force on Nov 24, a few days before my arrival. The Tories, once the proud defenders of individual freedom, failed in a last effort to postphone it:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1643610,00.html

KnutAlbert

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