Hogmanay, 1990, could’ve been 1991, not sure, never been good with dates. I’m in the pub, it’s rammed, the music’s loud, really loud, the beer is cheap, really cheap, my chums are here, I’m warm and happy and a little bit drunk then a little bit more then a lot. I’m not saying my university years were wasted by any means but the memories that linger aren’t of jurisprudence or Roman law, they’re of nights like this one, nights in the pub, and particularly this pub. Glorious.
The pub was/is The Blue Lamp on the Gallowgate in Aberdeen which was half-way between uni and town so featured in many nights-out. It’s a pretty vengeful wind that whips down the Gallowgate in December, or any time of year, but you’d step inside, under the lamp, and into warm. I know nostalgia’s at work here, of course I do – the past is often warmer than the present – but the Lamp was a fine pub and popular and the Hogmanay hoolies were particularly good.
Which is why the news this week that the Lamp is closing down has come as a bit of a shock. I heard about it when my chum Scott, with whom I spent many a night in the Lamp, sent me a copy of a letter the owners of the pub had written about its future. “Dear friends,” it said. “Sadly, the rising costs of running a business have reached a point where it is simply no longer viable for us to continue operating. We have tried everything to keep The Blue Lamp’s doors open, but the financial pressures – from energy to upkeep to general overheads – have grown beyond what we can sustain.”
The letter goes on say that the closure of The Lamp – the last night will be December 30 – will “leave a hole in the hearts of many” and judging by the 700 (and counting) comments on the pub’s Facebook page, they’re right. People talk about the great nights they’ve had in the pub, the great beer, their memories of the man who used to run the place, the late Sandy Brown, and how upset and sad they feel at its closure. And I’m with them: tear a chunk out of the life you know and it hurts.
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But a couple of the people commenting on Facebook also make a good point about what people are feeling: nostalgia for The Blue Lamp isn’t enough, nostalgia can’t keep pubs open. The vast majority of my visits to the Lampie, great though they were, were in the 90s when I was a student and I’m thinking: when was the last time I went there? Can’t remember. And so to that extent, I would have to include myself in what’s happening; I’m part of the problem.
There are bigger issues at work here though. I may not go to the Lamp like I used to but I still go to pubs regularly, the ones that are near me now, and I would’ve expected the student population that frequented the Lamp in the 90s would have been replaced by the current student population. But habits have changed. I recently did a tour of Glasgow pubs – sober I might add – to find out what was going on and one of the big trends was that young people aren’t drinking as much as they used to.
Some of the young people I spoke to told me the reason they drink less is they’re more health-conscious or down the gym and so forth and there’s some truth in that. But the big unspoken trend is drugs: they’re more common, they’re more freely available, and many more people are using them (inhale deeply on any street in any British city and you’ll know what I mean). I remember one publican telling me: “the pensioners died off and the generation coming up were just junkies” and it’s had a profound effect on pubs.
But the small print of The Lamp’s announcement reveals the other thing that’s going on here and thankfully it’s one we could do something about. The pub is closing, they say, because of financial pressures, from energy to general overheads, and this was definitely something that came up again and again when I went round speaking to publicans. Government, they told me, is putting up, or failing to remove, a host of hurdles in the way of pubs: energy costs, employers’ national insurance, business rates, you name it. One publican told me she feels like an unpaid collector of taxes for the government.
Fortunately, there are some simple steps that government, national and local, could take here. At the local level, councils could make it easier for people to get out and about. Glasgow for example could drop its cap on taxi licences (pub-goers are going home earlier and earlier because they can’t get a cab). And in Aberdeen, the council there could drop its draconian controls on driving and parking which make it more trouble than it’s worth to come into town.
But the big picture won’t change for pubs until national government acts too. For a start, we should look at the planning laws to ensure pubs cannot be shut one day and developed as something else the next. On energy prices – one of the factors that’s made things impossible for the Lamp – we need a cap for pubs, tapered towards the smaller businesses. And we need relief on business rates and VAT, which would help to close the gap between the prices in pubs and the prices in supermarkets and focus action on alcohol in the right places; do the supermarkets ever turn away people who want to buy lots of cheap alcohol?
I’m not saying these steps would save every pub, particularly pubs in more deprived areas, but the hundreds of comments on the Lamp’s Facebook page demonstrate what’s at stake here – places of community away from home, places of friendships, places of work, happy places – and it strikes me that if The Lamp can go, then nowhere’s safe. And so I urge you, if you happen to be in the Aberdeen area on December 30, to go in to the Lamp and mark its closure with a little drink of whatever you fancy. Have one for the past of all the pubs you’ve loved. Then have another one for their future.
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