The perfect pub

Whenever one of those news stories appears about how many pubs have been forced to close in the last year, I always think of George Orwell. He would have had the correct reaction: lots of pubs are forced to close because they’re terrible. Yes, the pub is a wonderful British institution, with a long and noble history — but that doesn’t mean that any individual pub has a God-given right to stay open forever. If a landlord waters down his beer and scowls at his customers, as plenty of them do, they’ve only got themselves to blame when the bailiffs come knocking.

We know Orwell had strong opinions on the subject because he wrote an article about it, setting out the qualities of the perfect pub, a sadly mythical place he called the Moon Under Water. He loved open fires and china mugs, and hated barmaids who called you ‘ducky’ rather than ‘dear’.