With 40 pubs shutting down every week, the continued news of pub closures fills 99% of me with sadness, and 1% of me with an almost unbearable smugness. I am sad not simply because I enjoy going to the pub, but because as I explained in a previous post, pubs are a social and communal good. In our crowded cities, north European climate, and inhospitable and over-regulated streets, pubs represent a crucial source of public space. Why a tiny part of me is unbearably smug will become clear.

When the idea of a smoking ban was first broached I had yet to become addicted to the fine pleasure of tobacco, but nonetheless I was opposed to its implementation on grounds of civil liberties. Yet – as is becoming increasingly clear – I could just as easily have opposed it on the grounds of self-interest. Whenever the ban was discussed many people asserted  their right to go to the pub of their choice without sitting in a smokey environment if they do not wish.  In this post-fordist age, consumption is – more than ever – constructed as an individual act. People are no longer content with a black model-T. They want a car that is just right for them.  By the same token if people go to the pub it is their right not to have their experience contaminated by somebody else’s unwanted habits.

Yet the thing is that going to the pub is, by its nature, an enormously collective form of consumption. Here in London you will pay about three times as much in the pub for your beer as you would in a supermarket. Now there are various reasons for that, but one of them is that you are paying  – not unreasonably – to sit in a well maintained space smack-bang in the middle of where lots of cool shit is going on.  Now obviously  nobody could shoulder this burden alone. Instead pubs rely on lots of people effectively paying for that collective space to be maintained. Whether you like it or not, when you choose to enjoy a pub you are enterring into a relationship with other people using it.

And when you enter into a relationship with people you have to compromise. You might have to listen to loud music which you do not like but other people do. By the same time you cannot expect the environment to be smokeless just because you feel like drinking in pub x and want to drink in pub x without encountering any smoke. Non-smokers , concieving of their pub outings to be purely individual forms of consumption felt justified in relying on the law to ensure that their pub outings were exactly as they wished. Perhaps when their local shuts down – and pub-shutdowns increased by approximately 100% after the smoking ban – they will be pushed to conceive of pubs and pub-drinking differently.