In my last lengthy solo car trip, back in 2018 (Plano – Las Vegas, described in full here), I spoke of seeing small towns on the map, expecting to find a gas station so I could fill up the Tiguan’s tank and not be stranded in the middle of Nowhere New Mexico in sub-freezing temperatures, and getting to the “town” to see… nothing but a few houses.
So this little comment by Jeremy Clarkson rang several bells for me:
“Loneliness is a big issue in rural areas and part of the problem is villages losing their soul. You don’t have a village doctor anymore. He’s in a health center 30 miles away and you can’t get an appointment. There’s no village bobby on the beat. There’s no village vicar, there’s no village shop, there’s no village school. If we end up at a point where there’s no village pub then what is a village? It’s just some houses. Pubs are the hub and it should always be that way.”
I bet it’s the same Over Here, too. We’ve read all sorts of stories about how small towns can’t find doctors who want to work in tiny communities, how young people are quitting the towns of their birth and childhood for cities because there’s nowhere for them to earn a living as singles, let alone as a family, and how the arrival of a Walmart ends up with the “downtown” becoming a ghost town.
It’s all very well for one to take the “survival of the fittest” attitude towards this phenomenon — that such places shouldn’t be supported because they’re economically unviable — but that seems to me to be very harsh.
Then again, if a municipality is incapable of supporting even the most basic of services necessary for survival — auto repair shop / gas station, restaurant, doctor’s consulting room, post office, or even a school, for example — then there really is no reason for its existence. (We’ve never really had a “pub culture” to the extent they have it in Britishland, but that doesn’t mean a local bar should be excluded from consideration, either.)
Moreover, when those establishments don’t exist there are no employment opportunities either, even at the most basic level: waitresses, auto mechanics, receptionists, mail carriers or schoolteachers. No wonder the kids clear out.
And yes, things are a lot easier in the U.S. for people who choose to remain in small, secluded villages because our infrastructure is so much better here. A ten-mile trip in, say, rural Tennessee is no big deal, a ten-minute drive or so; but it’s a whole ‘nother situation in rural Britishland, with their narrow roads that meander all over the place before (eventually) reaching the chosen destination. Back when I was living Over There, getting from Free Market Towers to the local village of Melksham, for example, was a journey of only a few miles, but it was a full half-hour’s drive involving no fewer than six different roads and directions. (Rural Wisconsin, incidentally, has the same problem with minor roads marked as “KK” or “UU”, but at least you can cane it along them because they’re relatively wide and straight. You are likely hit a deer, though, something highly unlikely in rural Britain, but that’s not the point.)
And from a pub’s perspective, you’ve got that added issue of the dreaded Driving Under The Influence, but when if you’re just going to the local for a pint or six, you have only to stagger home, no car necessary. (Ask me how I know this. #KingsArms #EnglishmansFarm)
What, then, creates a community, if there are no establishments where one can see neighbors and which can foster some kind of community spirit? As Clarkson says, if it’s just a bunch of houses — which are insular by definition — then there is no community, and no soul.
Unfortunately, I don’t see any solution to the problem.
I have lived the past 19 years in a rural county in south-central Indiana that has NO drinking establishments. NONE.
It didn’t used to be so, back when we first moved here there were 2 or 3 places to tie one on but they have closed down, mostly due to gov’t regulations and cost. See, until about 6 years ago there was NO alcohol sold on Sundays, and even still, none sold before 11 am. Nothing like driving half an hour to the only store in the county on Sun morning to buy your weekly supplies and find out you can’t buy the alcohol you were wanting unless you hang around, while your frozen foods melt.
You know, if you scratch the surface of just about every single industry in this country now you will find an absolute barrage of regulations to deal with and it keeps getting worse with each passing year.
I am an architect and engineer and have been working in my field since 1972 but in the past 6 months there have been so many new regulations to comply with I am seriously considering getting out. Seems like more of my job now is administrative paper and rules juggling than actually doing a job for my clients. I always enjoyed my work but the gov’t has turned my livelihood into miseryville. I’m not happy about it at all.
I was once a member of a close knit community. It was a HOA, but still, it was a community!
In all seriousness, the sense of community is all but gone here in the states, with two exceptions I can think of that are really not anything to celebrate: the drug community and the inner city poor (some overlap).
In the drug community, groups that share dealers are necessarily tight knit. Users tend to group together and share (or steal) what they have with each other. A user that wants to live will always have a fellow traveler nearby with a ready dose of Narcan in case the worst happens.
The inner city poor also are a pretty tight knit community. Take a walk in the worst of the worst communities and within two steps of setting foot in their neighborhood (or more colloquially, “the hood”) and you will be marked as an outsider and intercepted by their version of the neighborhood watch. With not much else to do, the young men of the village will hold informal meetings on street corners, and children and young mothers will be out and about, as well as the local entrepreneurs selling their wares to those outsiders there for legitimate (for them) reasons in a well choreographed dance. Of course these communities often end up with mostly harmless zombies wondering around and the occasional gunplay when a dispute breaks out. This is just the way things are.
So what is a community then? I think it comes down to people who do things together. Here is northern Virginia suburbia there is a growing Muslim community who all go to prayers at the local mosque.. I know because the road outside it will be a traffic jam of epic proportions today for Friday prayers. While they seem to be an inordinately large group, I have a sense that they are close knit. Being of a Christian persuasion I have no idea if that is true, or, like the catholic community, they fade into the woodwork when not doing their religious thing.
Beyond religion and those thrown together out of necessity, I fear you are right. Technology and a supercharged supply chain have largely made the needs side of community cohesion mostly obsolete. There was once a country store a few hundred yards up the road from me. It carried the usual stuff you would find in any 7-11 and was run by an old couple. The old lady would whip up a made to order sandwich from hand sliced meat (of questionable age) if you dropped by at lunch. The problem is, beyond the questionable lunch fare, there are two 7-11s on either end of the road adjacent to major roads and they both have gas pumps. I suspect the owners passed away or went away and not that store stand empty as is was acquired by others who couldn’t actually generate any revenue either. This little store encompasses everything you are talking about here and the death of community.
I grew up in a little town in GA. “Pubs” didn’t have the social acceptance there as they do in Europe and other places. There’s that, too.
I think, for a lot of small towns in Texas, there’s the farming/ranching community. My uncles would go most mornings to a small restaurant and drink coffee and shoot the shit with other old farts for an hour or so. That’s after they woke up early, checked on things around the ranch, then went into town. Afterwards, they’d go back for a full day of work too. Any town worthy of the name in Texas has a Dairy Queen, which is another gathering spot. And of course there’s always a dance hall or similar around. And that’s in a town of less than 2000. But the real community gathering was the church. You could go almost all week without seeing another person, but then you were damn sure at church Sunday morning. I know my dad, who didn’t go to church with mom and us kids my entire childhood, joined the local church after his retirement. My mom said he was never so busy as he was doing all the church committee stuff. There were cook-offs, banquets, work days, etc. that kept all the old geezers busy.
The pubs, taverns and bars around here are run like restaurants where they turn tables as fast as possible. One restaurant downtown has decent food, a good spirits list and it is usually crowded and loud. I avoid that place whenever possible. THe closest bar is more of a dive bar. The other dive bar across town finally closed down and is now a donut shop.
Growing up in the suburbs, there was some closeness in the neighborhood. You would stop to talk with neighbors on a walk, swap home grown produce, baby sit for younger kids, mow lawns and such. One of my neighbors grew up and moved to a condo complex several towns away. She said she had been there a couple of years before she really met any neighbors. She missed the old neighborhood.
I have two rules for any situation like this.
1. Follow the money.
2. People want to do what they actually do and what they say they want to do has nothing to do with it unless it’s while they are handing over the cash.
I like places like pubs enough to spend the money it takes to support them. Every week we go to at least 2 of Stoneyslope Brew Pub (Good craft beer, weird, but not bad hippy food, No Loud Music), Rendezvous Lounge or Alvin’s Jazz Club for dinner & dancing or one of several Royal Canadian Legion halls also for dinner & dance. But I’m lucky and live in fairly large city.
Most people don’t know what to do in pub-like places and so don’t want them and most people who open and/or run pub like places are incompetent fools who think everyone wants more fake and expensive decor, TV sports and screaming loud “music” 24/7. Even the UK is falling to that rot.
Up here in Canada the Legions used to serve as local pubs but they have largely committed suicide by refusing to accept that young people have some good ideas and have created some good music. They are closing rapidly and even the ones I frequent are doomed. Too much Boomer music repeated endlessly.
Damn, this post hit one of my softhearted g-spots, because I grew up in rural America, a farm town of 750 which I don’t even think would qualify as a village. In my dad’s day it supported a part time MD, appliance store, ice cream shop, hotel, grocery store, municipal pool, five or so café/bars, and 3 gas stations.
In my day that had dwindled to a shell of itself, and is down to one cafe/bar, the local grocer holding on by their fingernails, and the pool.
There are two community activities, the bar and the local church (of the Brigham Young variety).
Mechanization did as much to hollow out our town, because when farm work was by hand, and there was no welfare check, it brought in a lot of folks. But our town also committed a certain level of suicide because it decided to Mormon up a few years ago and all the gentiles basically said “pound off” and now they wonder why people stopped coming to the community events.
I could go on forever. I dunno what to do, I don’t live there full time, but I miss most of it.
My youth was spent between two towns, one small (a-1000) and the other medium (b-22000) in Missouri. They remain largely the same as they were in the 1960’s. Town a) is on a major thoroughfare through the state, has history as a railroad/riverboat shipping port, and is only 25 minutes to a major metropolitan area.
Town b) is in the west central part of the state and starting in the 1960’s, started focusing on maintaining and bringing in good quality jobs. They did this by creating, from heaps of plywood, a community college/technical school that is now one of the tops in the country. It paid big dividends and attracts workers from many small towns in the area, who are able to maintain their rural lifestyle and be within commuting distance to a well-paying jobs.
Unfortunately, many towns and districts did not have that foresight or ability. There are great swaths in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and the rest of the midwest where there simply are no jobs. As the young men and women leave to find them, the towns’ tax base erodes, schools and businesses close and they’re left with a nasty Walmart 3 towns away.
I was back home recently, visiting a cousin my age (67) and she has her home up for sale. She bought it for $42K back in 1979 and she’s had in on the market at $49K for over a year–not one showing.
I’ve lamented the demise of pubs and taverns on this forum before, but when I have to cross 5 police jurisdictions to pay $18 for a pint of Guinness and $24 for two Scotch eggs in a loud fake-pub with hard chairs and ear-splitting music, my pub days are over.
When I was dating my (late) wife in the 70’s, she lived in Milwaukee, which had (and still has to a lesser extent) a great neighborhood tavern vibe. Good food, good beer, neighborly conversations and about every 2-3 blocks a 2 to 4 lane bowling alley in the basement (set your own pins).
Here on the western edge of The Great Basin of NV, we’ve gone from the largest town in the state (1910) with a booming (really) mining industry, 5 railroads, and 20,000+ residents to a narrow stretch of US-95 with just a couple hundred souls. Now, the rails are gone, no gas, no groceries, two bars that do serve bar-food depending on the day of the week, a part-time diner, not even a motel – but, we are the County Seat (wooppee). Thankfully, we are only 26 miles from another old mining town that still has all of that going for them.
On a positive note: We do have some of the clearest night-time sky in the country.
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This hits home for me. In my old age, I can see that our WNC town is slowly dying. The local “village” (Pop. 400) has no pubs or liquor stores at all, and the local convenience stores didn’t even sell beer until a few years back. The larger town (20 miles away) isn’t much better. One of three supermarkets closed down. The only pub in town recently closed down and I don’t think any of the restaurants sell liquor by the glass. Well, we’re in the “bible belt”. The Burger King in town closed down and I’m told it will be replaced by a “sushi” restaurant. Sushi? Really? It’s like I’m watching a slow-motion depression…
The latest season of Clarkson’s Farm dealt with this topic. Apparently the home of pub culture is losing about 1000 pubs a year or so. They also lost their local abbatoir and more are closing each year due to government over regulation apparently.