Shropshire Star comment: Changes brewing in our towns
In the see-saw of popularity, pubs have been on a down, while coffee shops have been on the up.
Take a stroll through any town and tick off all the pubs that were such a familiar part of the scene a decade or so ago. There will be many missing, casualties of a calamitous decline which has seen many closed, boarded up or even demolished.
Now start counting the coffee shops. The picture will vary from place to place, but overall there has been a big rise. In the five years to 2016, about 6,000 pubs, bars, and nightclubs closed, while over the same period the number of coffee shops grew by 2,000.
So coffee shops are killing off the pubs? It is a lot more complicated than that, but coffee shops are obviously offering something that is in tune with the way we live our lives, choose to socialise, and choose to shop.
There are pubs which continue to thrive by knowing their clientele and increasing their appeal, but overall there is no longer the mass market to support the number and variety of pubs.
These ranged from the minimalist spit and sawdust hostelries (now largely extinct), to those which risked being considered “soft” by offering comfy seats and branching out into food.
What links the rise of the coffee shops with the fall of the pubs is that these trends are being played out against the background of a common changed landscape, where some things are able to survive better than others.
Pop to a coffee shop and typically the scene will not be one which could easily be imagined in a pub setting of yesteryear. There will be a mix of young people chatting and looking at their mobile phones, older folk resting their feet while out shopping, families enjoying a break, and so on.
Standards are generally high, and the coffee, with its delicious welcoming aroma, is much better than the excuses for coffee that past generations often had to put up with.
The downside of their rise is the risk that the big chains will squeeze out the local independents so we end up with coffee shop monopolies, removing choice and variety from our high streets. We want coffee shops to complement our high streets – not take them over.
