It was with some trepidation that I stepped into the bar. Although I would not call myself a regular, I probably go there about once a fortnight. But last time I tried to visit, the place was closed for redecoration. The reason: the previous landlord had decided to call it a day and lease the pub to a local brewery turned pub co.
The ghost of the past.
If anything, the beer range has increased, while the array of whiskies remains excitingly broad. But the formerly yellow walls (and cream ceiling) have been coated in a swamp-like brown-green colour, and seem naked without the paintings of jazz musicians. The blend of blues, jazz and punk that formerly snaked quietly from the speakers has been replaced by a louder selection of largely naff (and occasionally quite bad) pop-rock. With the exception of a retained barman, the staff are clad in uniform black shirts.
These changes may be subtle, and they may not ultimately deter me from the pub, but they are not changes for the better. A place I like has been made less appealing, albeit very very slightly. It could have been a lot worse. It could've been better.
Change can work for the good, of course, as well as for the ill. At a pub I visit with some regularity it was once necessary to avoid the beer on account of the fact that it all tasted the same. Now the beer doesn't taste the same and there's more of it. The rooms are getting redecorated (and not in sludge), and the whole atmosphere is very much improved. The only negative is that the place is now closed on Mondays because the lack of demand that day made it uneconomical to stay open.
People have different tastes. Some people who grew up in a world of keg beer have no time for real ales. Some people prefer lager to bitter, and some don't like beer at all. Some like to drink from the bottle, listen to loud music and play slot machines. Some like to drink from a tankard, listen to sea-shanties, and play bar-billiards. This breadth of attitudes is accommodated by a near-equally broad range of drinking establishments. A town or city may have dozens if not hundreds of bars, pubs, taverns and inns of every persuasion; a village can potentially sustain a couple of options. Even within a single building, space allowing, it is customary to offer more than one drinking environment: a lounge at one end and a tap-room at the other, for example. The hope is that at least one of the rooms will approximate to our respective tastes.
There are less libraries than there are pubs. This gives us less freedom. We may even only have one room with which to play, and it is hard to be all things to all men. Whenever we redecorate we have to balance the needs of our loyal regulars, who've been with us through thick and thin, with that ephemeral untapped market we'd like to tempt within our doors. It is important to keep a firm hold of the baby when draining the bathwater.
The comments in this Guardian article (brought to my attention by @tixylix) make interesting reading. Of course, the cliché goes that no sane person ever wrote to a newspaper, and that such rights of reply are inevitably unbalanced (in at least two senses). But another cliché has it that there is a grain of truth at the heart of a green-inked pearl.
This is not to say that we should never change: there is much about our service which could be considerably improved. But we neglect the interests of our core market at our peril. A quarter of the population are active public library members: almost as many as watch EastEnders. But while we can drop a plane on a soap opera without damaging our viewing figures (such is the hook of the cliff-hanger and the investment in character and narrative) we cannot get away with the same in a library. Markets can be resilient, as Facebook Timeline proves, but that's not necessarily a reason to pu(ni)sh them.
There's another reason why we should be careful. When a pub I used to visit regularly decided to repitch itself as a trendy bar, I found somewhere else to go. This is not difficult: there are a lot of pubs. As we have already noted, there are not a lot of libraries. We offer a unique set of services and if any of those services are withdrawn, the previous users of that service are left with nothing. It's the argument we quite rightly apply to library closures, but it can also be deployed against our own seemingly endemic obsession with being seen as hip and with-it.
In reality it is not a simple battle between conservatism and fashion. It's the economy, stupid, and all that. The fundamental reason for the modifications outlined in all the pubby examples above was a change of hands, and a keenness of the new owners to put their stamp on a place and make it theirs -- often driven in part if not in whole by a desire to increase the number of punters that come through the doors. One can only assume that someone somewhere has determined by some curious means that swamp green walls are a people magnet. Likewise in libraries we often find ourselves forced to pander to a bureaucratic obsession with statistics and measurement, or to accept a pot of money with strings attached. Such is the game, and a very silly game it can be.
On the bright side of the pub, the Librarian's Axiom has it that while we may be suffering in the name of austerity and the 'Big Society', the rub is that demand for our services increases during a time of economic hardship. Add to this all those baby-boomers who are set to retire, get bored, and come through our doors, and we suddenly find that we have plenty of new statistics to pass up to management without having to pick up a single paint-brush. So long as the old paint-job doesn't start peeling...
These changes may be subtle, and they may not ultimately deter me from the pub, but they are not changes for the better. A place I like has been made less appealing, albeit very very slightly. It could have been a lot worse. It could've been better.
Change can work for the good, of course, as well as for the ill. At a pub I visit with some regularity it was once necessary to avoid the beer on account of the fact that it all tasted the same. Now the beer doesn't taste the same and there's more of it. The rooms are getting redecorated (and not in sludge), and the whole atmosphere is very much improved. The only negative is that the place is now closed on Mondays because the lack of demand that day made it uneconomical to stay open.
People have different tastes. Some people who grew up in a world of keg beer have no time for real ales. Some people prefer lager to bitter, and some don't like beer at all. Some like to drink from the bottle, listen to loud music and play slot machines. Some like to drink from a tankard, listen to sea-shanties, and play bar-billiards. This breadth of attitudes is accommodated by a near-equally broad range of drinking establishments. A town or city may have dozens if not hundreds of bars, pubs, taverns and inns of every persuasion; a village can potentially sustain a couple of options. Even within a single building, space allowing, it is customary to offer more than one drinking environment: a lounge at one end and a tap-room at the other, for example. The hope is that at least one of the rooms will approximate to our respective tastes.
There are less libraries than there are pubs. This gives us less freedom. We may even only have one room with which to play, and it is hard to be all things to all men. Whenever we redecorate we have to balance the needs of our loyal regulars, who've been with us through thick and thin, with that ephemeral untapped market we'd like to tempt within our doors. It is important to keep a firm hold of the baby when draining the bathwater.
The comments in this Guardian article (brought to my attention by @tixylix) make interesting reading. Of course, the cliché goes that no sane person ever wrote to a newspaper, and that such rights of reply are inevitably unbalanced (in at least two senses). But another cliché has it that there is a grain of truth at the heart of a green-inked pearl.
This is not to say that we should never change: there is much about our service which could be considerably improved. But we neglect the interests of our core market at our peril. A quarter of the population are active public library members: almost as many as watch EastEnders. But while we can drop a plane on a soap opera without damaging our viewing figures (such is the hook of the cliff-hanger and the investment in character and narrative) we cannot get away with the same in a library. Markets can be resilient, as Facebook Timeline proves, but that's not necessarily a reason to pu(ni)sh them.
There's another reason why we should be careful. When a pub I used to visit regularly decided to repitch itself as a trendy bar, I found somewhere else to go. This is not difficult: there are a lot of pubs. As we have already noted, there are not a lot of libraries. We offer a unique set of services and if any of those services are withdrawn, the previous users of that service are left with nothing. It's the argument we quite rightly apply to library closures, but it can also be deployed against our own seemingly endemic obsession with being seen as hip and with-it.
In reality it is not a simple battle between conservatism and fashion. It's the economy, stupid, and all that. The fundamental reason for the modifications outlined in all the pubby examples above was a change of hands, and a keenness of the new owners to put their stamp on a place and make it theirs -- often driven in part if not in whole by a desire to increase the number of punters that come through the doors. One can only assume that someone somewhere has determined by some curious means that swamp green walls are a people magnet. Likewise in libraries we often find ourselves forced to pander to a bureaucratic obsession with statistics and measurement, or to accept a pot of money with strings attached. Such is the game, and a very silly game it can be.
On the bright side of the pub, the Librarian's Axiom has it that while we may be suffering in the name of austerity and the 'Big Society', the rub is that demand for our services increases during a time of economic hardship. Add to this all those baby-boomers who are set to retire, get bored, and come through our doors, and we suddenly find that we have plenty of new statistics to pass up to management without having to pick up a single paint-brush. So long as the old paint-job doesn't start peeling...
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