Quote Ferocious Aardvark="Ferocious Aardvark"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.'"
Very unlikely if a pub was successful it would have been closed so that a supermarket could expose a loophole in the law. Most likely the pub was struggling to survive so closing it was the only viable option. Thankfully the supermarkets had the capital to renovate it and put it to use employing local people. The alternative another empty licenced property for vandals to have a go at.
