Mark Mason

The perfect pub

Seventy years after George Orwell imagined the Moon Under Water, here’s a modern guide to the ideal local

issue 12 September 2015

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.

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