Woodcutters Arms to close?

The Woodcutters in Whiteshill is for sale - could stay a pub but as the sales literature says it could also make a nice family home - rural pubs are disappearing with unprecedented speed - leaving more than half the villages of England 'dry' for the first time since the Norman Conquest - fortunately we are not in that situation but it is again potentially a sad loss of one of our local facilities.

I've not been to the Woodcutters for a couple of years but used to meet a friend fortnightly there for a while - very much a locals' pub - the sad thing is that as the pubs disappear so too do the breweries - 100 years ago there were 6,000 historic breweries in Britain, now there are only 500. This is again another piece of our local culture disappearing - see previous blogs like recent one on Guy Fawkes.

Locally Stroud is bucking the trend with the starting up of local micro-breweries like the Nailsworth brewery.

But Corporate forces are working against us - today the 8 biggest pub chains own around 30,000 pubs with their key approach being asset-stripping - seeing pubs as properties who happen to sell drinks - no interest in the atmosphere simply the profit. Furthermore they insist on selling their own beers rather than all the local ones....

In The Old Crown in Hesket Newmarket in the Lake District locals have responded by setting up Britain's first coop pub....maybe a route to follow if are local pubs look set to go? Read The Ecologist October 2006 edition for more on pubs.