Quote JerryChicken="JerryChicken"...while a lot of its drinking customers in the past were from the commercial businesses around it the main bulk were from the council estates behind it , the simple fact is that like a lot of pub businesses the drink at lunchtime and after work clientele is non-existent these days and the "locals" who live in the estates behind just didn't go in there, if you look along that whole stretch of Burley Road and Kirkstall Road you'll see a lot less than half of the pubs remaining that were there 10 years ago, they are just not regarded as an asset by the community despite the old fashioned rose tinted spectacle view of being a social gathering place for them ....'"
I assume you're wrong on this, as we have clearly been told by another poster that the pub industry is in fact thriving, so what you say simply can't be true. There must be double the pubs, and they are surely all packed to the gunwales.
I was hardly denying that there have been major changes in society and social activity, though, nor was I trying to advance some simplistic one-size-fits-all panacea. The fact is, supermarkets and developers have been responsible for closing down of hundreds of well-used community pubs by taking advantage of lax planning laws, these being the reason they target pubs if sited where the supermarkets want to be. They can be soft targets. Whether this particular pub was one of them doesn't affect the wider point, and if a pub really has lost its trade and can't replace it, then like any business, it is doomed, there's no argument there. The argument is that in very many cases the closing of valuable community pubs is a scandal, against the wishes of locals and nothing to do with viability. I don't argue that's the case in every closure.
